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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24323842">Gauntlet Lore Ramble Archive</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitzirocker/pseuds/mitzirocker'>mitzirocker</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Reset Timeline Adventures [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Twitch Plays Pokemon (Let's Play)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Glitches, Weird Time Shit, Weird Voices Shit, fossil god-adjacent nonsense</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 05:15:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>29,410</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24323842</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitzirocker/pseuds/mitzirocker</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>I posted a bunch of lore during the Gauntlet on the lore Discord, and I'm collecting it for posteriority. Contains extra as a unit of measurement, friendship, and the ever-growing threat of world-ending catastrophe.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Reset Timeline Adventures [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1756045</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. An Alternate Summer Sky</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I had a ton of fun making lore during the Gauntlet, and I came out of it with the clearest outline of TPP's metastory I've had for a while. The stuff I'm posting here isn't fully up to date with my current lore thoughts, but those'll probably change anyway. Thanks to everyone on the lore Discord for putting up with me rambling at them endlessly. Slightly edited; mostly adding context and adjusting the formatting.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The last big bit of lore I made for the Gauntlet, half plot summary, half final form of my lore ideas. For now, anyway.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>why is this thing eight thousand words long</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Kalos Pokémon League takes place in this enormous ancient building that’s an important historical site in its own right. Bulbapedia says it was probably based on Notre Dame, though I have no idea what it used to be in-universe. Religious thing? Government thing? IDK, it isn’t too important. What is important is that behind the training grounds and the battle arenas and the Hall of Fame, there’s a nice museum that chronicles the many things this building has been throughout its long history. It doesn’t draw as many people as the league, but it’s still on all the ‘things to do in Mountain Kalos’ tourist information things. Today, strolling beneath the elaborate arches and investigating the artifacts on display, is a somewhat unusual group.</p><p>Two men with obvious foreign accents, around forty, one taking photos with a heavily modified holocaster, the other asking a million questions about everything he sees. A green-haired individual of ambiguous age and gender, trailing behind the others to admire the stained glass. A woman with serious eyes, maybe thirty, constantly scribbling things down in a little notebook. A twentyish youth who looks an awful lot like Champion Diantha, showing the others around and providing irreverent commentary. And a preteen girl who keeps walking into walls, visibly uninterested in the museum but curious about her companions.</p><p>Every so often, the man with the modified holocaster will tap something out on it, and something nearby will ripple with formless haze. Many of the museum’s unidentified artifacts flash or glow or hum when the woman with serious eyes walks past. The dust in the air around the little girl forms into elaborate fractal patterns. All of them have pupils tinted the exact same shade of purple. But there’s nothing scary, or even unsettling, about the way they’re interacting with each other or the people around them. Despite their personal differences, despite their weird powers, they’re just six people with something very specific in common, going out on a trip together.</p><p>Thirty years ago, a boy half the world away woke up with an extradimensional mind hive in his head. The world has changed a lot since then. It’s not the world that was before the Voices arrived, and it’s not the world that was born in a very different timeline under very different circumstances. By now, the reset timeline is its own setting, functioning in its own ways, with its own potential futures. In the pleasant warmth of a Kalos summer, Red, Dipper, N, Izzy, Reese, and Esther meet up. They go exploring, buy Kalosian sweets, and get to know each other.</p><p>Most important of all, they tell their stories.</p><hr/><p>Who created the reset timeline is something Red still doesn’t know. He’s not sure whether the reset timeline was created as a response to the OT shattering into an unviable mess, or whether someone or something broke the OT in order to create the reset timeline. (For the purposes of this ramble, I’ll be calling the GRed host Red instead of Reddo. A certain other Red will always be marked as such.)</p><p>The point of divergence, he’s pretty certain about. That February night when a hundred thousand Voices broke into his head. If the Voices had also been reset, if they’d been the barely sentient memoryless mass of chaos that overwhelmed a child they basically didn’t notice and drove him insane – Well. It might have all happened again.</p><p>Fortunately, the Voices are immune to everything, including – not just the timeline, the structures that underpin the timelines themselves being rewound. The Voices that set up shop in this Red’s mind remember their adventures, and their kids, and what they’re capable of doing. (They were kinda hazy on how they got there, but the Voices are usually pretty hazy on what they do when they’re not hijacking pokémon journeys.)</p><p>Anyway, yeah. Pokémon journey. It’s an interesting thing to do in a world that isn’t on fire, is the vibe Red got off them early on. Boring, almost. He spent the first month or so trying to figure out where they’d even come from. The world they knew was so like his own, but so different! An exciting land of adventure, where danger lurked around every corner. Neither he nor the Voices put it together until Mt. Moon. Until Helix.</p><p>Suddenly bumping minds with a batfuck crazy eldritch abomination was. An experience. So was discovering what happened to his alternate self. You don’t expect your world to be a thin and fragile crust over an endless ocean of madness and death, y’know. No matter how bright the OT turned out, in the beginning it was a very dark place. Pretty much as soon as the Voices left him, red started researching how to stop it from happening.</p><p>It was the Voices who got him started, actually. A wide-ranging if somewhat uncreative working knowledge of the new and dangerous art of glitchmancy isn’t even in the top three weirdest things they don’t know why they know. Took Red a while to figure out how to apply it, but once he did… It’s simple, really. Beneath the physical world, in the deeper layers of reality, lie substructures that define what the surface can be. Glitchmancy is the art of editing these structures, which can be encoded using these particular equations –</p><p>‘Math math math math math,’ says Reese. ‘Get to the point.’ Everyone else’s eyes are starting to glaze over, except for N’s, which are sparkling. Red gives this long drawn-out sigh, and gets to the point.</p><p>Manipulating glitches became Red’s weapon, his way to safeguard his world against the horrors that lurked beneath and around it. Figuring out how it worked was a long and messy process with several dead ends and at least one narrowly averted apocalypse, but over the years it’s certainly paid off. Very few people in the reset timeline have the ability to throw around the kinds of power common in the other timeline, and that was even more true early on. Red is one of those few people.</p><p>Weapon in hand (well. In laptop) Red waited for his battle.</p><hr/><p>It’s not that Oak and Blue and the League and the pan-regional professor organisation didn’t believe Red about the fossil gods. Massive legendary-induced catastrophes have been known to happen now and then, like natural disasters. It’s just. Red came back from the Pokémon League raving about nightmare gods and doomed timelines and the end of the world, and that’s the kind of thing that’s hard to imagine in a late summer evening in Pallet Town with cicadas chirping outside the lab.</p><p>Outside context problem, and all that. This world is so inherently low-key what Red’s describing sounds luridly unreal. There were, however, concerns about what Red was researching in order to stop them.</p><p>Red didn’t ever officially storm out of Pallet Town and vanish into the mountains. He just spent more and more time doing experiments in the wilderness and less and less time trying to convince people to help him, until he just wasn’t there anymore.</p><p>Dipper knew basically none of this when the Voices came to him. He was Professor Elm’s youngest aide, around the same age as Red and Blue and infinitely dippier. He was sort of the annoying tagalong kid to the group of children that clustered around Oak and Elm. But Alice died and Aurora moved away and AJ stopped coming into town and Blue had to run his gym and Red disappeared and one day Dipper was the only one left. He was planning on searching for Red during his pokémon journey even before the Voices.</p><p>Oh yeah, them. Three and a half years after they left Red, the Voices possessed Dipper. It was kinda weird for both of them, mostly because Dipper was planning to use his journey to perform deep long-term investigations of this very specific subset of grass-type pokémon and the Voices had absolutely no experience with pokémon journeys that don’t boil down to fighting a bunch of guys. They’d never known a pokéverse at peace. Why wouldn’t you need to know how to fight?</p><p>But Dipper was curious enough that they ended up working together pretty well. The Voices handled all the team composition, Dipper showed the Voices how to use the pokédex printer, it’s all good. During their journey, Dipper got the impression that the Voices found it interesting to explore Johto without the fate of the world on the line for once.</p><p>Although there were similarities to the other timeline, things that were familiar to the Voices that probably shouldn’t have been. It was never anything huge, and never anything that couldn’t plausibly be a coincidence, but when Red and Dipper put a list together after they left the resemblance was eerie. Why were Team Rocket doing very similar things to what the Cult of Helix did in AJ’s Johto? Why did the legendary dogs just happen to leave the Burned Tower when Dipper was around? Lance had become champion in a different way than he had in the other timeline, sure, but he still fought the Voices at the exact same time with the exact same team.</p><p>So, yeah. That was a creepy thing to discover after the fact, but at the time Dipper didn’t really notice it. Even Ass, the igglybuff with a glitchy shadow – even if Dipper had known that the glitches didn’t appear in the other timeline until after Platinum, which he didn’t, he would probably still have chalked it up to what Red was doing. For the most part, Dipper’s pokémon journey was peaceful (by the Voices’ standards, at least.) And then they reached Viridian City, and things started getting weird.</p><p>It started with Cal, the kid with the pile of spooky tat in the basement of the Trainer House. When Dipper went to battle him, Cal made a summoning circle and did some chanting, and then his eyes flashed purple and the voices instantly recognised Kay. He could do other past hosts from the other timeline, Dipper and the Voices quickly discovered. They never stuck around for long after their battles, but Abe said something about being trapped in the void and Xena said something about how this better have been worth it. Dipper’s chill though, and the Voices are always hype to see their old kids, so no one was as weirded out as they perhaps should have been.</p><p>So they fought Blue, and they climbed Mt. silver, the last place in Johto they hadn’t checked for Red yet. Whatever they were expecting to find at the top, it certainly wasn’t a massive scenery-destroying godlike-powers battle between Red and a boy who looked just like him but with spiral scars all over his body and a vicious madness in his eyes.</p><p>How, exactly, the other Red escaped the void the other past hosts were trapped in, Red still doesn’t know twenty-five years later. He suspects the answer involves some overly confident psychic sap, and Helix too, obviously. The other Red wants Helix out of the seal, and sees the fact that it’ll destroy the world as an added bonus. Since he’s also been slowly fusing with Helix since the Voices left him and is thus able to tap into its power, the other Red poses probably the single biggest threat to the ongoing stability of the reset timeline. (He’s usually less omnicidal than this, I swear. It’s just that the utter destruction of everything he loved and worked for may have touched a nerve.)</p><p>So yeah. Massive god battle. With Dipper’s assistance, Red eventually won, trapping the other Red in a cage of glitches and putting him under the heaviest guard he could find in the depths of, like, Cerulean Cave. Once he dealt with that, Red tried to vanish into the mountains again. Dipper stopped him.</p><p>Despite having fought every last person in the entire Tohjo region by then, the Voices stuck around just long enough for the inevitable tearful reunion. Working together with them (and with some backup from Blue) Dipper convinced Red to come home.</p><p>After the Voices left, well, Red had a lot to do. It’s a lot easier to convince people of a potential existential threat to your world when you can just point to your evil alternate self. He didn’t exactly found the Silence mark 2, but he did start building a network of people who could help him. Dipper, meanwhile, went back to his research. Saving the world, things like that, that’s never really been his thing. He’s much more suited to studying all the myriad strange pokémon he and the Voices caught on their journey. Somehow, he still ends up showing up for all the big battles. He’s good at keeping people from going too extra.</p><hr/><p>Four years later, hundreds of miles away…</p><p>N is vague about where they were and what they were doing before they came to Hoenn. Being vague about their origins is their third favourite hobby, after smiling serenely and wrecking shit. At least, that’s how Red describes them. N describes themself as a friend to all pokémon, who was ‘travelling around making friends’ when they came to Hoenn and ran smack into the Voices.</p><p>N wouldn’t say they were expecting anything of the Voices, for reasons too obvious to explain, but probably the most unbelievable thing they did in the first few hours of their acquaintance was look through their memories and go <em>HEY WE KNOW YOU!</em> In the other timeline, there was, of course, another N. It turned out that the Voices knew this N.</p><p>They remembered the other N as strong and kind and intelligent, a protector of pokémon and a dear friend to humans. N’s first glimpse of the other timeline was an important, beloved, heroic version of themself, and though they’ve managed to put together that the other N had their share of pain and hardships and failure, they still see the person that other N ended up being as someone they’d love to be.</p><p>(‘From what we can tell,’ Izzy tells Esther, ‘the other N was active in a time period still several years in our future, and looked much the same as they do now.’ ‘They also haven’t visibly aged in the past two decades,’ adds Red. ‘Why not?’ Esther asks N. N smiles serenely and continues.)</p><p>N learned a lot from that journey across Hoenn. What it’s like being a human, how humans and pokémon interact with each other, what humans and pokémon can do for each other, together, the sort of things N wouldn’t even have thought to look for on their own. They can see why the other N didn’t know any of it until Ghetsis found them. But the Voices and the people of Hoenn taught N so much about the world! So many amazing things they never knew, from how to summon the golems of legend to how to build a secret base.</p><p>And, as their journey went on, N learned how to help people. Little things, like delivering a letter across a strait. Big things, like convincing a long-dormant legendary to prevent a region-destroying catastrophe. The longer they travelled, the more they learned about the other N, the longer they got used to the idea of thinking about their future, the more certain N became of what they wanted to do after the Voices left them.</p><p>They wanted to go on helping people and pokémon to work together and live in peace, and be the best versions of themselves. And since the Voices left them, that’s what N’s been doing.</p><p>(Reese goes, ‘wait, seriously?’ N nods.)</p><p>For all the time they’ve spent fighting, N and Red do have something in common: they both want to create an ideal world. The difference is that for Red that world is the one that existed before the Voices came, with towns separated from the countryside and impassable barriers between human and pokémon, whereas for N that world is one that doesn’t exist yet, one where people and pokémon cast aside their differences and combine their strengths in a new harmonious way of life. A world that can change and adapt to anything that comes to pass, rather than trying to impose an artificial stability that will eventually break anyway. The work may take generations to be completed, but no matter what, N will see that their perfect world is created.</p><p>… Or so they would have told the others before everything that happened in Unova. They still have that same dream, but they’re currently... reconsidering their tactics, a little. It’s a long and somewhat embarrassing story, and N is much happier soapboxing about their ideals than recounting every last humiliating detail, but there’s one part of N’s goals that Unova made them value even more strongly.</p><p>In the new world, there will be a place for everyone. That includes the fossil gods.</p><p>Back when the Voices were with N, they learned about what happened to Helix. Their immediate instinct was to break the seal and set the gods free from the impossible darkness. It didn’t take them too long to realise this might be less than practical and may have unintended consequences, but still! The fossil gods would eventually drag their way out of their prisons, even without various interested parties who might see fit to help them along. The way N sees it, they can either return as crippled insane abominations in so much pain they don’t even notice the reality they’re ripping apart, or as enthusiastic ambitious friends, willing to understand the ways their world has changed while they were gone and eager to shape it into something ever more beautiful.</p><p>That’s why N and the Voices bullshitted their way up the Mirage Tower to pick up Root, and why, after the Voices left, N went exploring deep into the Desert Underpass to find Claw. Bringing the fossil gods back to sanity and then onward to theory of mind is a long-term project even by the standards of N’s long-term projects, so N started by just taking the fossils out to the beach, letting them leap off N’s senses to examine the world around them, getting them used to the idea that reality was a thing that existed.</p><p>Their – it really, really wouldn’t be accurate to call Root and Claw’s presences ‘voices.’ They’re more like direct emotional feeds pressing onto N’s mind, like talking to a pokémon except unfiltered and hard to interpret and unbelievably loud – imprints have grown much more varied over the decades. Less endless overwhelming pain and rage and fear, more aloofness and grumbling and very occasional curiosity. N can even tell their personalities apart with ease now, something that was very hard for them to do at the beginning.</p><p>Progress was slow, but it was happening. N had their plans and their path, always busy, always looking ahead, and then, well. Things started going wrong.</p><hr/><p>There was something wrong, Izzy knew, growing up. Something about the world that was imperceptibly off. There was never anything definite that you could point to. Just, as she grew older, she overheard more worried conversations between adults, saw more stories about conflicts and disasters around the world, heard more rumours about terrible things happening in Sinnoh. Her world was still peaceful, and, for the most part, happy, but there was a growing sense that it was a lot less stable than it looked. Izzy was born around the same time Dipper finished his journey. The Voices came to her ten years after they left N. In the time between, the world grew just a little bit darker.</p><p>It was still recognisable as the world that was before the Voices came, though. Izzy might have been taking the gym challenge as part of her research into pokémon battles, but she’d still take careful notes and publish her research in the appropriate channels, like her parents had done when she was their age. Then – okay, there’s two reasons why Izzy’s pokémon journey went off the rails. Two immediate reasons, anyway.</p><p>Reason one: the Voices. Reason two: instead of a blank new pokédex like the one he gave Diamond, Rowan gave Izzy this battered monstrosity that was covered in duct tape, took thirty seconds to turn on, and was full of already registered entries.</p><p>Oak gave Dipper Red’s pokédex as a possible clue to his location. N took Dipper’s pokédex because it looked interesting. Rowan gave Izzy N’s pokédex because the Voices were obviously back and their every appearance in this timeline had been linked to this one object. It was the key to understanding the Voices, and everything that had happened since they came. At least, that’s the theory Rowan subscribed to at the time. Everyone in professor-y circles had been in a state of mild panic for a while.</p><p>Izzy, of course, didn’t know why they were panicking, or how it linked to her used pokédex. When she asked around, Rowan was evasive, the Voices were unhelpful, and none of Rowan’s aides knew anything useful. It was a Mystery. And Izzy had always loved solving mysteries. In a world that seemed ever more on the edge of something big happening, Izzy was determined to understand her situation and exactly what could happen next. During the early phase of her journey, she was mostly focused on trying to figure out what had happened to the previous owners of the dex and what Rowan was hiding from her. Then Galactic happened, and things got really interesting.</p><p>Figuring Out What Galactic Is Up To, And Also Stopping Them became the big quest of her journey. There were other mysteries to be solved – everything to do with her pokédex, the various myths and legends of Sinnoh, certain timeline inconsistencies that would take way too long to explain (short version: the weird mirror events in the reset timeline were happening way faster than they did in the OT) – but Galactic was a clear big thing she could study and understand and do something about. (There was something almost relieving about knowing that whatever bullshit came up could be pinned on this one group of assholes instead of a vague sense of undefinable dread.)</p><p>Izzy was resourceful and rational and, above all, level-headed. With her own natural talent as a pokémon trainer augmented by the Voices’ experience, she built a well-optimised team and prepared to take down Team Galactic once and for all. The chase led her to Lake Verity, then Veilstone City, and finally to Mt. Coronet. She knew what Team Galactic was trying to do. She knew how to stop them. When she and Diamond got past Cyrus’ minions, she understood everything around her and what she needed to do. She could take on anything.</p><p>Then the void opened beneath Cyrus’ feet, and her whole mental conception of the world shattered.</p><p>The Distortion World was like nothing she’d ever seen before, nothing she’d ever conceived of as something that could exist. Yawning emptiness in every direction, upside-down waterfalls and disappearing rocks, probably-meant-to-be-plants standing completely still… Where was the light coming from? Why did solid objects crumble into pieces if she moved far enough away from them? How were her pokémon breathing, without any air? What was in the shadows she sometimes caught in her peripheral senses? Why was she so sure it was watching her?</p><p>Nothing made sense. Every time she thought she’d found a pattern several things would break it all at once. Shards of worlds that had been or could be, distant music she almost recognised, what if there was no way to understand how this place worked, or what it was? She hadn’t thought this place could even exist, and yet… What if everything she thought she knew, every tool she’d obtained for understanding the world around her, was a useless illusion? What if she was just alone in the great darkness? Izzy was already incredibly freaked out when she leapt down from a platform that vanished as soon as she left it and ran into Cyrus.</p><p>Maybe illusions don’t work as well in the Distortion World. Maybe Cyrus had stopped bothering now he no longer had to keep up appearances. All Izzy knows is that for the first time ever she could see through his humanoid shell and –</p><p>She still can’t do it. A decade and a half, and she still can’t describe the thing she saw in the depths of the Distortion World. Entropy, dark matter, shrivelled whiplike limbs, gleaming red eyemouths all occupying the same notspace. Everything she thought she knew was wrong, was useless, was nothing in comparison to the endless unknowable void –</p><p>She ran away. She went back into her own world, into a place she understood (thought she had understood), began training to take on the League, hoping Cynthia would be able to do something, but she couldn’t. Cyrus won.</p><p>Izzy’s still not entirely sure on how exactly that went down. At the time, she was near Snowpoint, trying to grind her weavile. One second, the Voices were hanging out in the back of her mind, arguing and playing pinball and telling exaggerated stories in an attempt to cheer her up, the next, they were screaming and cheering and crying and going <em>IZZY IZZY YOU’RE BACK!</em> Trying to get a coherent story from the Voices is like squeezing blood from a stone even when they’re not overexcited, but she managed to piece together that they’d been somewhere in that fraction of a second. Somewhere empty and dead. A world without spirit. An old acquaintance had busted them out (possibly at the cost of their own life? Unclear) and sent them back to Izzy.</p><p>She eventually got more information out of Drive, once they convinced am to actually talk, but at the time, in the snow-covered tall grass, all she could discern was that, because of her fear and her failure, Cyrus (or whoever) had almost(?) destroyed the world.</p><p>That was a turning point, for Izzy. She got just a little bit stronger, and she went back, and she defeated Cyrus. She captured the creature that inhabited the Distortion World and added it to her party, not so she could understand it, so that she could weaponise it.</p><p>That day, Izzy learned that there are terrible nightmarish incomprehensible forces lying under and around the world she knows, like a tiny campfire in the midst of endless night, ever beset by shadows. She also learned – not even that they can be fought, but that they must be fought. The light may be a weak pitiable thing, but it is all she has. Red is scared of a dark alternate future? Izzy fears that the world may have no future. After the Voices left her, she travelled the world, researching ancient myths and collecting legendaries. Whenever anyone or anything tried to pull a Team Galactic, Izzy was there to fight it back.</p><p>No matter the soul-deep terror she faces, no matter how much she must harden her heart, Isabelle will protect her world. (Even if, sometimes, she wonders if she’s made a massive mistake.)</p><hr/><p>Ah, Unova! Reese loved working at Pokéstar studios. They’d film every crazy idea you came up with, work with any unique take the Voices made, and the special effects budgets were nuts. Reese may have gotten better at making movies, but her early work was some of the most fun she’s ever had on set. Not that that’s what she expected to be doing when she came to Pokéstar for the first time! She used to have this whole thing against scripted performance, deliberately tried to ruin her own first movie –</p><p>‘ARE YOU KIDDING?!’ yell Red, Izzy, and a decent subsection of the Voices. ‘Why would you possibly think-‘ ‘This isn’t about-‘ ‘We’re trying to fill her in-‘ ‘How can you be-‘ N slowly shakes their head. Dipper shuts his eyes.</p><p>‘After everything that’s happened, Reese,’ says Dipper. He doesn’t even raise his voice, but Red and Izzy immediately stop shouting. ‘I don’t think you can avoid this any more. I know you don’t like talking about this sort of thing, but so much happened in Unova, and you were there right from the start. Please, can you tell us your part in the story?’ ‘We can talk about movies after,’ Esther puts in. ‘I wanna know how you know my friends!’</p><p>Reese blinks. Then her face relaxes into a smile. ‘Okay. Here’s what I remember.’</p><p>In the seven years between when the Voices left Izzy and came to Reese, the global political situation or whatever got markedly more intense. It was less a vague sense that the world was moving faster and more violently than it ever had before, and more a series of crises that happened one after another all over the world. Less the calm before the storm, more the early phase of the storm.</p><p>Not that Reese was paying much attention. As you may have been able to gather, all this fighting-evil saving-the-world befriending-gods stuff really isn’t her scene. All she knew about Team Plasma was from news reports she caught out of the corner of her eye and Yang ranting about his sister’s purrloin. She didn’t realise their civil war was a thing until about three months after it was over.</p><p>(Everyone looks at N. N sighs and says, ‘I made several regrettable decisions, particularly in my choice of allies.’ There were quests to obtain the power of legendaries, several epic battles, a final showdown in N’s ridiculous castle, and a boy who was almost certainly a former host from the other timeline. It was this whole deal, but it’s not the story they’re here to tell today.)</p><p>It’s not that Reese looks down on people who are into that sorta thing, though. Her relationship with Yang is more complicated these days, but at the time they were the best of friends. She supported his goals to punch every single member of both Team Plasmas in the face, he supported her goals to become the most dazzling celebrity in Unova. She still took the gym challenge, but that was less out of a desire to be champion and more because her mom was worried. And then, while Reese was busy rising through the ranks in Pokéstar studios, Ghetsis decided to be a dick.</p><p>(‘The most immediate cause, as far as we can tell, was his faction coming into contact with Drive,’ says Izzy. ‘We know they made a deal of some sort, though we’re not sure how much ai told him.’ Drive is a roughly fossil god-y entity who wasn’t affected at all by the timeline being rewound. Before ai got into contact with Ghetsis and fed him all that information, ai was meddling with events behind the scenes in cooperation with a now-deceased ‘partner.’ It’s very likely that the similarity of events occuring in both timelines was at least partially down to active skulduggery on the part of Drive. Ai’s in Interpol custody now, and actually answers people’s questions, some of the time.)</p><p>Reese isn’t sure what Ghetsis actually wanted to do. Take over the world, or something? She doesn’t really care. Even if Reese hadn’t kept running into the plot (she blames the Voices), though, she thinks she’d still have been aware of what was happening with Team Plasma. An army of gym leaders arriving in Unova from the other side of the world here, an exhibition centre shut down because of Plasmoid nonsense there… Reese is the absolute last person who could give you a blow-by-blow account of the ongoing crisis, but from what she understands what started out as yet another spat over the leadership of Team Plasma somehow snowballed into a full-on war for control of the region with ridiculous superweapons and whole cities turned into battlegrounds. It was epic, apparently. Give it a few decades to recede out of immediate memory and Reese might make a movie about it.</p><p>While all that was happening, Reese kept on doing her own thing. Making movies, running Join Avenue, doing publicity tours, going off into the wilderness to catch pokémon with the Voices, she had way too much to do to get involved with any of that. Even so, she brushed up against several weird things. Like this fellow actress who the Voices were absolutely convinced was one of their former hosts, despite about three million reasons she couldn’t be. (‘Wait,’ says Red, ‘How early did you know-‘) Like this liminal space she found beneath the Relic Castle during the battle of Opelucid, where the voices of the gods resounded in the void. Like her Darkrai.</p><p>Reese met Darkrai in this incredibly haunted house near Reversal Mountain. When they met, Darkrai was devouring the dreams of an innocent soul or something. Reese was scouting out locations and gathering a cast for a horror movie at the time, so she hauled them down to Pokéstar to be in the movies. Unlike most of the pokémon she caught for a movie, though, Darkrai stuck around. They liked acting, but they had a real talent for directing and scenario writing and that sort of thing. A lot of Reese’s strange ending movies are that way because of Darkrai. They were also a pretty good battler (or at least pretty good at cheesing with Dark Void) so they started coming with Reese whenever she needed to beat something up. Soon they were one of her best friends, a trusted companion in both moviemaking and exhibition battling.</p><p>Funny thing, though. When she did some research (it was for a film project, that’s her story and she’s sticking to it) she found out that Darkrai – this world’s Darkrai, anyway – was well accounted for. Izzy caught them at some point. Reese saw hers on a news report while her own Darkrai was in their pokéball. It took Reese a while to work out the details, especially since her own Darkrai can’t really remember anything before the strange house, but she thinks they’re a Darkrai from some alternate universe, maybe the other timeline? Reese legitimately doesn’t know.</p><p>… Oh, yeah. And they tried to take over the world. They had this whole overcomplicated plan that involved the Voices and their minions doing specific things at exactly the right time and movies what brainwashed people. Reese was completely in the dark about it until all the other hosts ganged up on her at the PWT.</p><p>That whole incident… Reese still doesn’t really get involved in fate-of-the-world god battles, because it’ll never be her thing. The Darkrai affair did, however, teach her that it might behoove her to at least be aware of what’s happening on that front. Reese spent the entire time Pokéstar was evacuating Unova just trying to fix some of the damage Darkrai had caused. The two of them eventually patched up their friendship, but their professional relationship was irrevocably soured.</p><p>Last she checked, Darkrai was making experimental indie films in a region with a name she can’t pronounce. Their movies still have weird mental effects on anyone who watches them, though they’ve apparently picked up a production team that keeps their more megalomaniacal impulses in check. Kind of a shame things turned out the way they did, but Pokéstar fell apart not long after they left Unova, and all its talent scattered to the winds. Reese and Darkrai might have ended up on opposite sides of the world no matter what happened, because, well…</p><p>(‘You guys can explain it,’ Reese says, gesturing to the others who were there at the PWT. ‘I can’t even tell how much of it was a dream.’ They flick glances between each other. Soon, everyone is looking at Red.)</p><p>The PWT was initially a plan to stop Reese’s Darkrai. The idea was to frustrate the Voices into leaving Reese, thus removing Darkrai’s most potent weapon and making them that much easier to take down. And the Voices did get frustrated! So frustrated they got organised to a degree that no one thought was possible and, whining and bitching all the way, they took on everything anyone could throw at them! There was this brief stalemate after Reese took down Izzy. A lot of people glaring at each other, a silence that was starting to become awkward.</p><p>And then a hole opened up in reality. Out of the hole poured the hosts of the Voices from the other timeline, led by the evil alternate Red. (He escaped from custody at some point. Red doesn’t know when; he’s more preoccupied with figuring out how.) Formless in the void, they had waited outside reality, until Red and company set up something that was originally designed as a Voices trap that the former hosts could hijack and use to destroy the world.</p><p>(‘To be fair, that’s only some of them,’ says N. ‘There are multiple factions at work among them.’ ‘I still feel sorry for them,’ says Dipper. ‘They just want their world back.’)</p><p>Exact descriptions of what happened next would get incredibly technical very quickly, but the short version is that it turned into an absolutely massive god/Voices/glitch/legendary/psychic battle that raged on for like a week and set most of Unova on fire. It was exhausting. Afterwards, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that the timeline remained mostly intact, and Red’s specific glitch setup that the former hosts exploited to get their old powers back was definitively smashed.</p><p>The bad news… Well, first the battle did <em>something</em> that set off a wave of evil team uprisings, legendary tantrums, wars, natural disasters, and just general extra that swept around the world and is still reverberating today. Secondly, while the fossil gods had already been racing back to consciousness at a pace even N was concerned about, the battle somehow gave them a massive boost. Red knows he doesn’t have the background knowledge to understand the exact cause and effect, but after the battle of Unova? It was no longer a matter of trying to delay the day the fossil gods came back. It became a matter of actively keeping them in.</p><p>(Red’s run out of things to say, so Reese picks up the thread of her own story.)</p><p>After the Voices left Reese and Reese left Unova and Pokéstar broke up, she drifted for a while, from project to project, studio to studio, region to region. There had been a magic at Pokéstar in Unova, with the Voices and her team and all her fellow actors. It took her a while to realise it wasn’t coming back.</p><p>So she made a new magic. She changed her stage name, settled down in Kalos, and founded her own movie studio. She’s got enough clout that clawing her way back to the top wasn’t as hard as it could have been. Still incredibly hard though, but she made it, and then she became champion of the Kalos Pokémon League. (It’s part of her attempts to put down roots here. The Kalosian aristocracy is awful.)</p><p>Reese isn’t busy doing the exact same things she was in her Pokéstar days, but she is busy. She’s happy to have so much to do, so many people to befriend, so many stories to tell. She’s living her best life, and she wants to keep doing this for as long as she can. The end of the world may come, or it may not. Reese has more important things to think about.</p><hr/><p>The Voices left Reese six years ago. Since then, there’s been what could be charitably described as complete and utter global chaos. So much shit is happening so fast, the world is changing at a pace no one could have anticipated, and all the hosts and the various people connected to them can do is try to steer everyone away from the most obvious potential disasters. The reason N and Red are working together instead of fighting is that they have so many more problems to deal with they can’t waste time on petty factionalism. The reason the Kalos League did basically nothing about Team Flare is that they weren’t even the tenth most pressing crisis kKalos was facing until the superweapon came out, behind things like ‘what the balls is Mega Evolution?!’ Red subsists purely on snack bars and spite. Izzy hasn’t slept in a month.</p><p>But Esther is on the younger end of the host age bracket. Unova happened when she was a toddler. This world, of change and chaos and more than a little danger, is the only one she’s ever known, and honestly? She doesn’t think it’s all that bad.</p><p>All things considered, Esther is a pretty ordinary kid. In Red’s day, she’d have been just old enough to go on a pokémon journey on her own, but in these less stable times her mother made sure she had a group of other kids to travel with. They fell into the Team Flare stuff half by accident and half by Korrina. It’s a somewhat complicated story Esther wasn’t paying too much attention to. She’s got more important things to do, like playing with her friends.</p><p>Making new friends is up there with football and collecting hats among Esther’s favourite hobbies. In a world where people whose grandparents never left their hometown are regularly travelling across regions, there’s a lot of interesting people and pokémon to get to know. On her journey, she’s made friends with several humans from all over Kalos, a swathe of pokémon from just about everywhere, and a few weirder things. The weirdest one of them all didn’t even have a name before she gave them one. The Voices call them Sail, but Esther calls them Friend.</p><p>Before they met Esther, Friend was trapped somewhere dark and empty. They could tell there was something outside the void, but no matter how they tossed and writhed they couldn’t reach past the nothing. Then this scientist gave Esther a fossil, and their minds touched. That first instant of contact was a little bit scary, yes, but then she realised that this vast alien monstrosity was lonely and terrified. There and then, she promised to get them out of there. Since the Voices already knew how to do it, she kept her promise pretty quickly. There were a lot of flashing lights and screaming, and at the end of it, there was a little pokémon sitting in the wreckage of the lab, and Friend was free.</p><p>That little pokémon, the amaura that grew into her aurorus, isn’t Friend’s real body. They’ve tried to tell her what that is a few times, and Esther’s not sure she understands, but she thinks it might be everywhere and everything. Friend prefers being an aurorus for now, though. They say it’s so they look pretty, but Esther can tell it’s because they’re still not used to being outside again. The last time Friend was outside, the world was so different. Even the air was different! Even the stars were different! There’s tons of stuff that exists now that didn’t then, and there’s tons of stuff that existed then that isn’t around any more. A lot of Esther’s journey has been showing Friend what life is like in this world, and all the different ways you can have fun.</p><p>They didn’t have photographs when Friend was last out. They didn’t have Lumiose galettes. They didn’t play football, and when Esther asked what they did play Friend said a bunch of really confusing maths stuff. Friend tends to be a little hesitant to talk about their life before the darkness. There were a lot of scary things, apparently. Esther is pretty sure that she’s the first friend Friend has ever had.</p><p>But that’s okay! Esther has lots of friends already, and they all like Friend too! Playing with Esther’s pokémon out in the grass, exploring all the fancy shops in Lumiose City, dancing with Tierno and answering Trevor’s questions and training with Calem and dressing up with Shauna and quietly eating poképuffs with Esther at the end of a long day, Esther can tell how happy Friend is to be in Kalos right now, living in peace.</p><p>She knows that not every one of the changes and new things in the world is good. The Emma situation proved that much. But there are other new things, better things. In the old world, Friend was trapped alone with their fear. In the new world, Friend can play happily and go on adventures with all the other children. That’s a good thing, right?</p><p>(It’s at this point that Esther notices the looks the other hosts are giving her. Even N looks a bit apprehensive. She scowls.)</p><p>Don’t be mean! Friend may be very strange, but they just want to be happy and help all of their friends. So what if they understand the world in ways Esther almost never gets? So what if Esther can’t comprehend what they are? So what if they’re older than almost anything else, and seem to be able to do literally anything? Esther won’t stand idly by while one of her best friends gets <em>bullied</em>!</p><p>… That might be a bit unfair, though. Adults tend to be scared of Friend, and with the Voices around, it’s so much easier to see the children the other hosts used to be instead of the adults they are. Still. Friend might be very big, and they might look (feel? Esther’s not sure how she’s perceiving this) kinda scary, but they’re not nasty at all. They’ve told Esther that there are big scary things out there that are as nasty as adults expect, but Friend’s just as terrified of them as everyone else.</p><p>And even so. Friend’s told Esther about someone else, just like Friend except opposite in every way. Other Friend is still hiding behind the walls, but soon Esther’s going to come and show them that the world outside isn’t scary at all. If some of these other big scary things are like Friend and Other Friend were, trapped and frightened and lonely…</p><p>Maybe all they need are friends of their own.</p><hr/><p>Eventually, the sun sets. Kalosian summer days are long, but not, like, Crown Tundra long. The reset timeline’s hosts of the Voices have had a very good day, even those who don’t really do museums. They’ve had sweets in the tea room, played silly buggers with the look-and-touch exhibits, raided the gift shop for (among other things) enough staffs and spears and hats for everyone, held a massive six-way mock battle on the greens outside (Esther won, of course.)</p><p>And they’ve talked. A lot. Not just about recent history, though they probably collectively know more about that than anyone else on the planet, but about the little things. Favourite sports. Dumb stories about the Voices. Their completed pokédex. Without the fate of the world on the line, without any great clashes of philosophical ideas, the six of them get along very, very well.</p><p>But it’s getting late, and eventually they get hustled out of the building by a guy who looks vaguely familiar in a Voices sort of a way. After that – well, Red’s gotta check on this glitchy egg he picked up and Dipper wants to catch a skiddo for research purposes and N’s received an invitation from the residents of pokémon village and Izzy has to type up her notes and Reese has a public appearance at way-too-early-o’clock tomorrow. The Voices are getting antsy in the back of Esther’s mind, trying to figure out if there’s anything else they can do in Kalos. According to the other hosts, that’s a sign they’re getting ready to leave. Esther will miss them.</p><p>She’ll miss the other hosts too. They were kids just like her once. She wonders what she’ll be like when she grows up. Still, she has a variety of holocaster-esque comm numbers and a promise from Red that he’ll answer her emails. Some day, when things have hopefully calmed down a bit, they’ll meet up again. Someday…</p><p>That’s the thing, isn’t it. For all the changes the reset world is going through, and it’s going through a <em>lot</em> of changes, it seems like it’ll keep its identity. It’ll be a different world from the one Red was born in, yes, but it’ll be a recognisable one, one that still has that innocent pokéverse optimism the other timeline never quite regained. Its residents are aware that there are forces at work which they can barely understand. They’re prepared to fight them, prepared to negotiate with them, prepared to adapt to them. The reset world may see violent change, but it will never see an apocalypse.</p><p>What kind of world will it be, in the months and years and decades to come? No one living here knows, but they do have control over the path their future takes. Perhaps the summer sun will shine less brightly at the end of the road, but the journey there will not have passed through so dark a country.</p><p>…</p><p>Maybe it would have been an easy thing to do at the start, to restore or recreate the world that was before the TIME TRAVEL wrecked everything. The two worlds, after all, started from mostly the same point. But now? With its own rules and its own heroes and its own destiny, the reset timeline is its own thing. Erasing it to replace it with the old timeline would be less than ethical at this point. Even if you don’t care about that, like certain former hosts don’t, its defenders are well-armed and knowledgeable enough you’d have to fight like hell for it. Merging the two timelines, or allowing them to exist side by side, would be complex and chancy even if the fossil gods weren’t consistent across timelines and could be split into alternates. But they are, and they can’t, and the Sail who is Esther’s friend is a different person to the Sail who failed to latch on to D. Who’s to say which of them deserves to exist?</p><p>Still, though. Jaw and Sail’s dyad aspect is [disjuncture/synthesis], and there are many possibilities floating in the distorted void. Who’s to say that somewhere, there isn’t a perfect ending?</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This thing is full of references to my other lore rambles and also those two chapters of Gauntlet Disasters I actually wrote. If you're reading this before anything else in this archive, I think <a href="#section0002">these</a> <a href="#section0007">two</a> will probably fill in most of the gaps. Still canon, though even looking over it a few weeks later, there's some stuff I'd like to change. Ah well, such is lore.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. How did we get into this mess anyway?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Originally posted mid-GRed.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I actually originally put this on Pillowfort, because I thought it was - get this - too long to directly dump in the server channels.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Okay, let's start by talking about the difference between time travel and TIME TRAVEL.</p><p>Time travel, in the TPPverse, is actually kinda hard to do? Consequence of living in a reality where the laws of physics are sentient and supervised. Getting visions of the past or the future is a thing, being able to control where you project those visions is somewhat less of a thing. Interacting with that past or future is incredibly hard, and actually changing anything significant...</p><p>Bill managed it. Bill managed it by harnessing every significant fossil god's powers to essentially rewind time far enough to the point where he could save his daughter. This resulted in crazy-ass randomisation that nearly tore the TPPverse apart, and also might have led to the birth of the glitches? Bill is indirectly responsible for OLDEN, thanks Bill!</p><p>Also, there's stuff this kind of time travel doesn't work on. The fossil gods, obviously, and the various beings above them in the power chart (most notably the Sinnoh legendary trios and the [W H E E L]). As you go down the power chart, the myths who know exactly what went down fade to legends with a scattering of incongruous memories fade to regular mon with a vague sense that something weird's happened. Also there's the goddamn Voices, who are completely immune to timefuckery because they're omnipotent, and their former hosts, who are just isolated Voices in meat suits. Everyone in that category, they're not affected by the rewind to various extents. They're still the people they were when Bill hit the button.</p><p>(Bill had to build, like, a special isolation chamber to sit in when the timefuck happened. Almost all humans get completely changed by this kind of time travel - it's an animals-without-souls thing, and I swear I'll write that meta someday.)</p><p>So yeah. When that got fixed, brief Cyrus digressions and all, it was less about the old timeline being returned to and more about it being remade. That's how the original timeline's Sinnoh, a smoking crater, got replaced by the randomised timeline's Sinnoh, a decentish place to live if you ignore all the politics – Aoooo talked Armour and Skull into doing it. After OLDEN, the fossil gods may have had to wring the glitches out and figure out what to do with the hazeworlds, but they were doing more or less the same thing when they put the TPPverse back together after AniCrys.</p><p>Bringing up OLDEN and AniCrys... We reach a problem.</p><p>The exact mechanics of S2/the glitchhaze arc are on the complicated side, but the short version is that at the end of VietCrys, the last run chronologically, the entire TPPverse has been eaten by OLDEN, aside from the tiny castoff that is Elf's World. Dome fought OLDEN for uncountable eons, but at the beginning of Baba’s journey, it is dying. By the time Baba encounters the glitchy husk of Abe atop <strike>Mt. Silver</strike> Baijin Moutain, it is dead.</p><p>Dome was the last of the fossil gods to fall, and the fossil gods are the TPPverse. Elf's World is kept from dissolving into nothing by a single Zygarde core and the severely-weakened Voices, and neither of them can hold onto it forever. Every [ERROR: VARIABLE 'TIME' NOT FOUND], the haze devours another corrupted route. Without a miracle, the TPPverse is doomed.</p><p>Because Baba is Best Girl, she decides to make their own miracle. With some of Abe's glitchmancer knowledge and a blood sacrifice, she enters Huatian City carrying a slowly glitching parcel, and begins to count her steps. The haze rushes in, triggering a futile (if awesome) battle between it and Team Baba. The Voices solidify the breaking-up dirt, and she keeps counting, forty, forty-one. OLDEN overwhelms Team Baba, and now it's just her, and the path, and the door, and the faint whisper of the Voices, sixty-six, sixty-seven. The sky is eaten, the air is eaten, the world is eaten, Baba begins to dissolve as the Voices' power fades, seventy-nine, eighty! With the last of her strength, Baba throws open the door -</p><p>She stumbles into the Viridian City Trainer's School, in the world where the pre-Anne parts of AniCrys happened, centuries ago. The glitches are a thing, and have wreaked untold havoc, but they haven't been consolidated and filled with hate. As the days pass, refugees from the hazeworlds arrive and the long-lost other former hosts drift in and the fossil gods reappear. tl;dr, Baba saved the universe by Dokokashira Door-ing back in time.</p><p>Cool. <em>This should not have worked.</em></p><p>Baba snatched reality out from under OLDEN's dominion. Baba built a full stable world where there was two square meters of unspecified land, a girl/fish, and a door. Baba resurrected the fossil gods, and though Dome remembers the glitchhaze, it's also missing its wounds from the OLDEN fight. The glitchhaze clearly still happened - the hazeworlds are popping back into existence, and OLDEN is way less dead than anyone is happy with - but it also unhappened. Time travel doesn't work like that. This is something else.</p><p>This thing, that can rewrite aspects of the timeline way more specifically and way more drastically than Bill-style time travel can deal with, that can affect beings that are immune to temporal fluctuations, that can change universes that aren't the TPPverse, I/ve taken to calling TIME TRAVEL. The Voices pulled it off by pushing their bullshit omnipotence to its absolute limit in a setting where there was no one to stop them. Whoever kicked off the plot of S6 did it with TIME TRAVEL.</p><p>What's happening in S6 is that somehow, the long arc of TPP, from Red to Omega Ruby, the wonderland, the glitchhaze, the S4verse, pain and sadness and heroism and hope, the tone growing lighter and lighter, from the destruction of the old world to the creation of a new one, has been screwed up. I don't know how, I don't know who, but events are all out of order and people are sharing rooms with their great-grandchildren and a massive war would probably be brewing if the layout of locations stayed solid long enough to raise an army. The fossil gods are fragmented, the Voices are ping-ponging all over the place, no one has any idea what's going on, least of all me, and the timeline is more a formality than anything else.</p><p>The S6 runs probably aren't in chronological order by any possible definition. They probably progress from less to more broken in some fashion? I'm still thinking about it. A lot of the S6 hosts are alternate versions of hosts from previous seasons, though what's happened to the originals I don't know.</p>
<ul>
<li>Kay (Burning Red): ... I'll get to him later.</li>
<li>Aqua (Volt White): An alternate Jimmy who was trans all along, it turns out. Probably from an 'earlier' run, given how his Unova is different, but not obviously broken.</li>
<li>Ace (RandoColo): An alternate A7 who was hurt just a bit more and learned just the wrong lessons and decided to take over the world. May have succeeded, given his appearance in Navy Blue. After Volt White, given the randomisation, but still early days.</li>
<li>Stars (XG): Stars... isn't an alternate host. I'm not sure what his deal is, but he has done a ton of research into various world-shaking voices disasters (he's a huge fan of Abe) and is the closest thing I have to a lead on how/why the TIME TRAVEL started happening. I doubt he's the cause, though. By the time the Voices reach him, the world's already started to change.</li>
<li>Fate (TriEme): Fate is a straight-up alternate Girl A and also a member of Team Skull, an organisation that didn't form until Girl A was like, forty. That alone tells you how bad the timeline's gotten when her turn comes around, and her bizarre unhelpful superpowers don't help. Also her chicken may have been popping up here and there in the pre-TIME TRAVEL timeline and been mistaken for a glitchy ghost. I have no idea where she is now, but I know she's doing something important.</li>
<li>Verge (RUM): What even the fuck. Do I even have to say this is way waaay down the timeline? I'm not too into the cursed diary idea, but I am toying with the idea of Verge's world as a patchwork of different times and places, all smashed into each other and fighting. There's like fifty Haus wandering around, some of whom are clones of each other. Verge herself may be an alt host, but she's definitely like thirty and an utter disaster of a human being. RUM, man. RUM.</li>
<li>Rey (Sword): Rey has good odds of being Eunice'd into a completely different season's arc. At a guess, maybe S4, if she's really the kid of someone from the Ultra Megalopolis? I don't know what's going on with her, but it's probably nothing to do with this nonsense.</li>
<li>Envy (Flora Sky): This time last year, when I made <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/16954515/chapters/42636104">this timeline</a>, I said I couldn't find a spot for Flora Sky (or Sweet, for that matter) so I was holding off until next year. It's next year now, I still don't know what to do with this genderfluid ninja kid. They live in a Hoenn that obviously isn't Hoenn, so they might be connected to this mess, but it feels like they're coming from a different direction to everyone else. If they're an alternate host, I have a horrible feeling they're an alternate Acacia.</li>
<li>Ai (Navy Blue): This is what happens when you TIME TRAVEL too much, kids. Has an endgame feel to it, or at least like something very important is happening offscreen. Ai didn't finish her journey, so maybe she failed? idk</li>
</ul><p>And now, we come to the Gauntlet.</p><p>Some observations: the world of the Gauntlet, or at least Red, appears to be less glitchy than even the old TPPverse was, let alone the current mess. The Voices know exactly what they have to do, and are trying and failing to use their bullshit powers to make the thing go faster. The new host is Literally Just Red, but personality-wise he's less the immediately-pre-Voices Red that spun off into Abe and more the immediately-post-Voices Red that tried to destroy the world. Or maybe he's just a massive edgelord, the point is, his mon are actively fleeing him. Helix is, to some extent, active.</p><p>Current mitzilore working theory is that the Gauntlet is someone's attempt to unfuck/rebuild the timeline. By using the principle of event resonance (when the same thing happens in two different timelines, those two timelines are, briefly connected. The more Voices-adjacent bullshit is happening nearby, the stronger the connection) and reenacting the events of the world that once was, whoever-this-is is trying to create a solid foundation for the world to rebuild itself. Or build a new one in their image, maybe.</p><p>Wrinkle the first: this kid is not acting like Red. He's got a purpose, a mission, and he refuses to let anything stand in his way. While he swaps out his team and releases his teammates, none of them actually die. He also wears a big identity-concealing trenchcoat. There are a lot of theories flying around about him. I think he could be Kay, the irregular from Burning Red, who can slip between time periods at will and has zero tolerance for fluff. Burning Red, I think, is the beginning, the first piece of the puzzle, the first hint that something was weird. He walked into the glitchhaze, defeated a glitch-possessed Cyan, and left, unchanged. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWeAsCzHvTo">Is he an angel, or an insane familiar? That depends on you standing before his eyes.</a> <sup>Hey, that's my song! - Evan</sup></p><p>Or maybe this is where Kay's story starts. Maybe, originally, he was Red.</p><p>Wrinkle the second: okay, in the original Red run, Helix latched onto Red about as hard as Red latched onto Helix. Struggling to stay himself among the shrieking Voices, struggling to remember itself in the endless void, they pulled each other out of the abyss, and have been OTP ever since. Basically everything about the I-guess-technically-you-could-call-it-a-person Helix became comes from it exploring with Red, interpreting through Red, listening to Red. By the time of the Ultra Space invasion, the line between Helix and Red was very, very hazy. They saved each other's lives, and they are always together.</p><p>But in a world where Red has minimal patience for the eldritch deity driven insane by being trapped in nonexistence, and has other stuff to do? The Helix that emerges from that fossil will be very different.</p><p>Miscellaneous plot ideas:</p>
<ul>
<li>The debuggers: collection of dudes with access to debug commands. Probably doing important stuff behind the scenes, but weren't actual hosts. Kay might be one of them.</li>
<li>Weird worldlets: the first one of these sighted was Auricanty, by Philippe, deep in the Distortion World. Larmog, Sweet Land, Spaceworld, maybe Flora, regions that are somewhat detached from the rest of the TPPverse, and possibly all this TIME TRAVEL nonsense. Maybe. We'll see.</li>
<li>Spaceworld: I once said that SwSh feels like a Pokémon game from an alternate universe where the main series went in a very different direction after Gen 2. Spaceworld is close to that, so I'm wondering if the three Spaceworld kids have anything to do with Rey, or Galar's another separated worldlet.</li>
<li>Jasmine: a TIME TRAVELLING magical girl, so obviously I love her. Has been showing up in places she shouldn't be since S3! The aftershocks of the TIME TRAVEL have been felt for a while. Connection to Spaceworld? The debuggers?</li>
<li>MetroSaph: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯</li>
</ul>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Wow, I forgot how edgy Reddo was when we started out. Anyway I don't think he's Kay anymore, but I do stand by most of the stuff I said about the stuff leading up to the Gauntlet. The 'weird worldlets' plot idea grew into something way bigger, may elaborate on it at some point. <sup>Also sorry Evan, the Red alt collective has stolen your song and they're not giving it back.</sup></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. So about that igglybuff...</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>When Dipper's igglybuff got given the same name as Reddo's missingno, people on the lore Discord speculated about some sort of connection. This is the conclusion I drew. Originally posted in early GCrys. Contains a complicated maths-y glitch explanation I probably got wrong, and the single worst pun I have ever committed.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Hmmmm. The missingno in Gen 1 - okay, under the hood Gen 1 has lots of tables. When it calls up an item, or a move, or a mon - hell, even a letter, what it actually does is look up the requested entry in the relevant table. Most glitchmancy is actually just making the game look up entries in the wrong table. Ask the game to call up the line-terminating character as a pokémon spawn, and you get a missingno.</p><p>In Gens 1 and 2, the pokémon table has 256 entries. 8 bits. In Gen 1, there’s 151 mon and the rest is all glitchmon. In Gen 2, there’s 251 mon and a mere 5 glitchmon. New additions aside, the table is the same between the first two generations. If it didn’t, the Time Capsule would be an absolute bitch to work. (They reshuffled the mon to pokédex order and expanded the table to &gt;10000 entries in Gen 3 when they rebuilt the engine.)</p><p>What this means is that if you sneak a Gen 2 mon past the Time Capsule cops and into Gen 1, you get a glitchmon. Don’t know if it works the other way - ‘spect the game really won’t like you trying to trade glitches - but if it does, almost all Gen 1 glitchmon, including all the missingno, turn into regular mon in Gen 2.</p><p>Igglybuff isn’t a missingno - in RB, its entry is occupied by <a href="https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/P%E3%82%A5_%E3%82%A5_%E3%82%A5">this thing</a> – but still. I’m getting the feeling that Reddo left the Odd Egg at the daycare.</p><p>Correction: looks like they did reshuffle the table order between Gen 1 and 2, so there’s probably some sort of maths converter in the Time Capsule.</p><p>Systematic Larrian glitchmancy involves a truly astonishing amount of maths. One of these days I’ll get an excuse to try to explain 8f, and then you’ll see complicated.</p><p>WAIT! HOLY SHIT! !THAT GLITCHMON THAT IGGLYBUFF TURNS INTO IN GEN 1? ITS NAME CAN BE READ ‘POO’!</p><p>ASS! POO! WHY!</p><p>AND EVEN IF YOU READ IT ‘PYU’ YOU CAN LEX THAT TO P.U. AAAAAAAAAAAGH</p><p>tl;dr, through moderate glitch analysis and a horrifying scatological pun, I have concluded that Dipper’s jigglypuff is a (failed?) offspring of presumably-Reddo’s glitch breeding experiments. And it’s been boxed, because Dipper cannot keep a full team.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This is entirely still headcanon, and it's also where I began thinking of glitchmancy as essentially a form of coding. It's basically an attempt to hack the universe, and involves laptops and ranting at rubber ducks and the occasional furious typing in a desperate attempt to stop reality from crashing.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Showdown on Mt. Silver (+additional setting notes)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Originally posted at the end of GCrystal.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Okay, let me tell you guys why the Red thing is amazing. Since I wrote that first chapter of Gauntlet Disasters, I’ve thought of Reddo’s motives as basically not wanting the OT to happen. Through the Voices’ many eyes, he saw the destruction and death, a world set alight by the return of the fossil gods. Not wanting everything he knows to be violently destroyed, he took up glitchmancy as a way to stop the fossil gods from ever coming back.</p><p>I talk a lot about the new world created over the course of TPP. I talk less about the old world that had to die for it to be born. (This is the reason Dipper and the Voices have such different opinions on what a pokémon journey is. The Voices have never known a pokéverse at peace.)</p><p>So, Red showing up on Mt. Silver means either Reddo has screwed up to an astronomical degree, or the OT is way less dead than he’d like.</p><p>Side note 1: Pretty sure Cal of the Trainer House is a medium, channelling the spirits of OT!hosts.</p><p>Side note 2: Even if Red is weakened by Helix still being sealed, he’s way better at scenery-crushing god fights than Reddo. In the noticeably-less-extra reset timeline, it’s kind of a difficult thing to practice! So when Dipper finally finds Reddo atop Mt. Silver, he’s already had his ass kicked (this could explain the no-refreshed-PP thing.)</p><p>On instinct, Reddo subs Dipper/the Voices in. This is a good call. For one, the Voices were able to kick Helix’s ass when it was a lot more powerful than this. For another, the Voices interpret absolutely everything they can as a pokémon battle, and their bullshit omnipotence is mostly used to make other people play along. And Red... isn’t great at team composition.</p><p>Side note 3: I’m increasingly convinced that what Reddo calls glitchmancy Girl A called dark magic. This power has been here for a long time. With this magic, the fossil gods were sealed.</p><p>Side note 4: I can’t wait to figure out what happens next.</p><p>Side note 5: Forever ago, I talked about the awakening and later unsealing of the fossil gods changing something subtle in the thoughts of humans and pokémon. The best I could describe it at the time was like the minds of humanity being brought to a boil. As the consciousness that underlies reality wakes up, things change faster than anyone ever thought possible.</p><p>Well now, I have the words. The fossil gods made everyone extra. As they returned, the TPPverse morphed from a low-key children’s picture book to a high-octane endless shounen fight manga. (For the record, the S4verse is an even more extra elaborate political isekai light novel. How, I have no idea. They don’t even have fossil gods!)</p><p>This comes back to the gauntlet in one important way. As we travel down the generations, the pokémon games will grow more ambitious. Plot! Legendary fights! Actual stakes! By its very nature, as it goes on, the Gauntlet will grow more extra. With everything I’ve described, the conclusion that can be reached is that slowly, inevitably, the fossil gods are waking up.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Totally still canon, especially the bit about the fossil gods making everyone extra. The rest of the Gauntlet didn't quite unfold like I predicted, but I did love what happened next. In retrospect, this was the moment where a lot of my headcanons about the reset timeline came together.</p><p>For the record, the reset timeline is a YA fantasy trilogy, with a well-defined structure and ending point, a fairly grounded tone outside the really big climaxes, and an atmosphere that never goes too bleak.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. N's ideal self (+something concerning)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Originally posted near the end of GEmerald.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>OK, we’ve hit the E4, and I’m still not sure what moment I’ll do for the third chapter of Gauntlet Disasters. Still, I do have l0re ideas! F’rinstance:</p><p>I’m not 100% sure the kid we’re in now is, like, Unova N. They’re certainly not the N the Voices know, King of Team Plasma, lonely and mysterious and driven, with a very specific philosophy about pokémon and a very strong personal connection to the mythology of the Voices. If they are the same N, they’re a much younger N with a much happier childhood. Travelling the world instead of locked up in a palace, befriending so many different kinds of pokémon… They didn’t know the Voices existed, let alone expect to be possessed.</p><p>They didn’t expect the Voices to examine their face and rifle through their memories and realise that hey! We know you!</p><p>Reddo is scared shitless by his alternate self. S1!Dipper died very soon after the Cult of Helix spread to Johto. Their relationship with the alternate timeline is... complicated. But N? N sees themself, passionate and brave, strong enough to protect the pokémon and people and world they love, and capable of forming bonds with everyone they meet. N sees that person, and thinks, ‘That’s who I want to be.’</p><p>(That’s why I’m wondering if our host might not be that N. Girl A chose her own identity, and maybe Nia did too.)</p><p>Throughout N’s journey, they’ve been trying to become the person the Voices knew. Not, like, out of an attempt to impress the Voices. It’s entirely a personal aspiration. Making real permanent friends, six pokémon with mail, Brendan and Wally and even maybe Steven? The other N didn’t seem the tea party type, but that is entirely the other N’s loss. N likes bows and ribbons and pink, and they’re very proud of their secret base. <strike>at least the voices didn’t trap themselves inside this one</strike></p><p>As they’ve journeyed on, seen more of the world and learned more about the other N, they’ve become aware that the path they’re charting doesn’t quite lead to the other N. That’s fine! N will be their own person, with their own experiences and philosophies, they’ve realised by now.</p><p>Still, the knowledge of the things the other N did and that therefore they must be capable of doing gives them the courage to continue climbing the Sky Pillar. Memories of Reshiram and Zekrom blazing in their mind, they reach their hand out to the stone and commune with a god.</p><p>And, after the world is saved...</p><p>The Voices are incredibly leery about their chances in the Mirage Tower. Just finding the damn thing takes forever, and balancing the bike well enough to reach the top floor is a nightmare, but the Voices are sure this is where the fossils are. And Rayquaza sounded so scared...</p><p>N reaches a hand out to one. The thing trapped within screeches and writhes, lashing out at everything, trapped in hatred and insanity and so, so much pain, but N stays calm. ‘Hello,’ they say to the monster. ‘My name is N. Do you want to be friends?’</p><p>Metaplot note:</p><p>Reddo’s journey was so similar to Red’s because, well, they’re the same person at the same time in the same place, just with wildly different Voices in their heads. Dipper’s journey had commonalities with AJ’s, and some eerie similarities - Team Rocket pretty much exactly replaced the Cult of Helix, fr’ex - but that was only three years of difference. Roughly the same people are important in roughly the same places because they’re still where they were when the timelines diverged.</p><p>But Hoenn? In S1, Emerald took place, like, ten years after Crystal. That’s already a big gap, but then you factor in the resurrected fossil gods and the flora and fauna millions of years extinct and the five-year-long gap in everyone’s memories and in a world where none of that happened Hoenn should be completely different, right?</p><p>And it was! It evolved in a totally different way, for very obvious reasons. But then the histories started... converging.</p><p>In the OT, Teams Magma and Aqua were formed to rebuild post-unsealing Hoenn, and only started fighting each other when they ran out of other things to do. In the GT, they form for completely different reasons, but they still have the same leaders and goals and uniforms. Roxanne was almost certainly born in the forgotten years. In such a different timeline, she shouldn’t have been born, but here she is! Even Norman, who was just on a business trip to Hoenn when the unsealing happened, still ended up getting the same girlfriend, moving to the same town, and taking over the same gym.</p><p>N’s Hoenn is obviously recognisable as Girl A’s Hoenn. That absolutely should not be the case. Reddo has no idea what is happening, and no sources he trusts enough to tell him what is. All he can do is make contingency plans and worry.</p><p>(Black happens, like, several decades after Emerald. How N is even alive is sth I’ll probably explain with (a) N actually being Nia (b) N not being entirely human or (c) weird time shit. TBH option (c) is going in no matter what.)</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Went for option (d), namely rejiggering the temporal distance between the Gauntlet runs. There's a whole lot of questions related to that which I still don't have answers for. Also option (b) got grandfathered in.</p><p>Anyway this is still canon. For more information on what I think Hoenn was like during S1!Emerald, you can read <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/17377868/chapters/40897037">this</a>?</p><p>I'd still like to write the remaining chapters of Gauntlet Disasters someday.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Why is Touhoumon suddenly relevant?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Originally posted... early-mid Touhoumon Revisit, I think?</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Okay, this is less an explanation of what’s going on in the Touhoumon revisit (I tend to play even faster and looser with revisits than I do regular intermissions,) and more an explanation of why Touhoumon, of all goddamn runs, is suddenly relevant. Like, even by weird gimmicky fangame standards, Touhoumon is unimportant. Even Moemon is significantly more important than Touhoumon. Athena does occasionally show up for the big host parties. Amber...</p><p>When the Voices reach her, Amber is right bang on the average host age of thirteen. She’s very obviously nonhuman. I go back and forth on whether she’s a literal puppet, but she’s definitely more youkai than flesh-and-blood animal. This is the norm for her world. Neither Touhoumon nor Moemon have any humans. There are two unusual things about her, as opposed to the rest of the village; the first is her nasty, spiteful, and defensive personality, and the second is her little sister.</p><p>Sanae is one of three young bonéka who appeared at the village gates some years ago, exhausted and ragged. None of them had any idea where they started their journey from, but they knew they’d been travelling for a long time. Once they’d recovered from their journey, they stayed in the village. They didn’t get along with each other much, so they all ended up in different ‘families.’ Sanae, the meekest and weakest of the three, somehow managed to befriend Amber. She’s the only person who Amber never snarks at. Amber has been known to poison people who bully Sanae.</p><p>Anyway, one day Sanae and the other two suddenly got an intense urge to leave their little village and journey... somewhere. And then Amber got possessed, and then she met a girl from a completely different world, and then Touhou/Moe. By the end of it, Sanae, who as it turns out was a newborn god created by possibly-Moltres, has grown into her deific power. She is prepared to battle the glitchhaze and secure a future for her tiny world.</p><p>Sanae, that is. Sanae is one of the many people who are more important than Amber.</p><p>Amber mostly acts as Sanae’s head servant and household manager. She‘s got some skill with Touhou-world magical research, but she’s so prickly no one wants to work with her.</p><p>In the glitchhaze timeline, she’s the first of the hosts to get eaten by OLDEN. She gets taken out really early too. (Athena misses her like crazy and forms a pan-world alliance to avenge her. This comes to naught, as most things do in the glitchhaze.)</p><p>In the post-glitchhaze timeline, she manages Sanae’s cult and never leaves her island. (She’s a very very minor player in the political situation that results in Storm Silver. Mostly this means having phone arguments with Ever.)</p><p>Around the time of the Gauntlet, she’s a disembodied Voice floating amongst the wreckage of the old timeline. Fuckin’ TIME TRAVEL.</p><p>Because the Voices are immune to everything, Amber was aware that something was happening. Because she is unimportant, she has no idea what. Thanks to the influence of the Voices, “Alola” was the most coherent and logical part of the physical world during RUM. Honestly floating in the void is kind of an improvement. At least it’s only boring here. She has time to think.</p><p>She’s more familiar now with the substructure of reality than she was before all this, for obvious reasons. Now that she’s not struggling desperately to save <strike>her country</strike> <strike>her village</strike> <strike>her family</strike> Sanae any more, a few inconsistencies have become clear. Now that she thinks about it, her world was always weird.</p><p>Like, the hazeworlds were created by Dome, right? Their creation was a weapon against OLDEN, part of their reality-breaking god fight. From what Amber’s picked up from Abe (he visits sometimes) Dome wasn’t especially concerned with anything above the consistent-laws-of-physics part of its creation, which is why so many hazeworlds are copies of main timeline regions. Dome didn’t have the time to plan further. (If it had, none of the hazeworlds would have had land. Dome occasionally goes on millennia-long rants about why building life outside of water was a terrible idea that has only led to disaster.)</p><p>But if that’s the case - what’s up with the Touhoumon world? It’s linked very closely with the Moemon world, to the point that the moemon are probably moe through the influence of Touhoumon, but it doesn’t look like it at all. Touhoumon is a high fantasy magical girl series that takes itself way too seriously, and Moemon is a shounen fight manga from before those needed to have plots. Culture, language, religion, metaphysics... Touhoumon has cities. Moemon barely has towns.</p><p>And the bonéka themselves - they fulfil roughly the same role as pokémon, but they’re so different! They work under a different type system, breed through :incomprehensible soul-related technobabble:, naturally form societies…</p><p>It’s a hazeworld! An early hazeworld! An early hazeworld that’s a straight copy of Kanto! Why is the Touhoumon world so weird? It’s not like Amber never heard this question before, but now it’s all she can think about. With everything she’s seen and everything she knows, her world shouldn’t have existed.</p><p>One idea she keeps coming back to (she remembers beating someone up for suggesting it) is that her world is the result of something completely alien trying to fit itself into a pokéverse-y mould. Amber doesn’t know about how the legendaries of Naljo just appeared there after the glitchhaze, even though they never existed in the original TPPverse. She does know about a weird world Athena said one of the Ultra Space hosts visited. A world with humans, but no pokémon.</p><p>Amber has no idea how that would even work. It seems completely alien.</p><p>If she stops talking for a few seconds, she can hear music.</p><p>Following the music, and the faint flashes of light, Amber travels deep into the distortion of the void. There’s been something from outside influencing the TPPverse for a very long time. Amber, unimportant isolated Amber, may be the first of the hosts to find out what.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This is more about what's going on behind the scenes than the rest of the rambles, more about the greater metaplot behind the Gauntlet itself. I'm not sure how canon it'll end up being - not sure how canon it is now - but I do plan on doing something with its ideas going forward. <del>Also I'm working on another timeline so all my oblique references to seasons gone past make something vaguely resembling sense to people who haven't known me since 2015.</del></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. A World Without Spirit</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Written just after the April Fool's Day Metronome Ruby event.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Okay, two things that you need to know up front. First, this is the first time the Voices have gone through the game-accurate plot of Platinum. Second, this isn’t the first time Cyrus has won.</p><p>1 - the reset timeline tends to hew a lot closer to the games plotwise in general, but especially here. In OriPlat, Sinnoh was still recovering from the randomiser, and Cyrus was much more Giovanni-ish? A crime boss, basically. He was using some weird files a stranger sent him on the internet to :murmured technobabble: and take over the world, the Lake Spirits weren’t even involved.</p><p>RandPlat took place twenty years and two timeline restructurings later, Sinnoh is an imperial state thrown into even more chaos by Phancero, while a million petty court factions try to seize power an exceedingly chill court artisan and the same Pearl as last time except he’s thirty team up to get to the bottom of all this. There’s a very ambitious bug catcher, and Jasmine of Olivine pulling one over on everyone, and regular Skype chats with Giratina. It’s a ride.</p><p>Point is, GPlat is the first time Cyrus has busted out the red Chains.</p><p>2 - ... When Napoleon froze in that bed, he lost. He was just a bit too late. Team Galactic reached the top of Mt. Coronet, and ran the program. I’m not sure how to interpret the rest of OriPlat - hallucination? - but at the end, the surface of reality has been devoured. Hovering in the distortion world, someone - might have been Alice, might have been Amber - poked Dialga the right way and rewound time. The randomiser came back on, ecce HeartGold.</p><p>(The end of OriPlat wasn’t actually that bad, by reality-getting-eaten standards. Whatever happened - and no one’s quite sure what - it did nothing to the fossil gods, so it was an easy fix, or so everyone thought. There were no glitches in the TPPverse before HeartGold.)</p><p>Much, much, MUCH later, a man with a cold personality and empty eyes arrives in Sinnoh from parts unknown. He takes over the Galactic Corporation, and begins to gather energy. He scares the crap out of Izzy, so she runs away. The Voices let her. After all, they can always come back. They leave Cynthia to hold the line.</p><p>Thing is, though, this Cynthia isn’t the heir of Nobunaga in exile, veteran of many disasters, and eternal badass of RandPlat, or even the champion who united her region to battle the randomiser of OriPlat. She’s... inexperienced. And Cyrus is terrifyingly strong. When she falls, no one is there to tag in, and then -</p><p>Well. The first thing the Voices notice is that they’re in a very small,l very dark place. Open their eyes (they have eyes?) sit up (they’re in a body?) feel the van rattle beneath them (they’re in a van?)</p><p>They must be in Hoenn, right? It certainly looks like Littleroot. But... There’s something...</p><p>The Voices are having a hard time focusing on reality all of a sudden. Their various weird Voices-senses are malfunctioning a little. They’re dizzy, and some of the stuff they’re seeing can’t possibly be real.</p><p>None of their pokémon grow, is the first and most obvious thing. No matter how hard they grind, they never get stronger. What pokémon they are, and what moves they use, seems not to matter? It’s hard to describe, but they can tell their starter - who is either a pikachu or a dusclops, they’ve narrowed it down - to use whatever move they yell, and it’ll work.</p><p>But the worst is - the Voices have been doing this for a while, and they’re a lot better at actually observing their surroundings than they used to be. Used to be that someone would say, ‘Are you feeling okay, kid? Do you want someone to call home?’ and they’d hear, ‘I took you for granted. As proof of your victory, here's the BOULDERBADGE!’ but these days they’re pretty good at hearing what people actually say as opposed to what they’re supposed to say.</p><p>But here? Everyone talks like they’re reading lines off a script, and they only say what the Voices expect them to. No one’s even commented on them constantly running into walls! That doesn’t even happen in their own pocket dimensions!</p><p>This empty world where the sun never moves and the weather never changes freaked the Voices out enough it took them a while to notice that their new kid wasn’t reacting to, like, them. Calming down their kids on their first panicky day is something the Voices are very used to by now. They’ve had kids they scared into silence before, but they’ve never had one this quiet. The Voices look at the spot in the mind hive where their kids slot in, and they see nothing at all.</p><p>They do Hoenn, because their path is the one thing they’re always sure about. Elf’s World was unstable, Alola? was incoherent, Flora-Hoenn was a confusing mix of familiar and not, but the Voices have never been somewhere this empty. Is there even a point to all this? Why are they doing this? No matter how many pokéballs they use, there’s always a new one when they reach into their bag. That’s straight-up rule breaking now.</p><p>In their husk of a body, the Voices reach Dewford. Maybe if they reach the E4 again, they can -</p><p>[you idiots.]</p><p>What that isn’t, is a voice. It’s more a pulsating frisson of sheer done-ness, pushed out to the Voices from below the physical world. What that is, is <em>familiar</em>!</p><p>If anyone involved had a physical body, the Voices would hugtackleglomp the Old Amber. As it is, they just rush them, chattering and laughing. Amber is unmistakably Amber, as annoyed at the world as they always are, not a part of the script.</p><p>[what are you doing.] Amber doesn’t say, because Amber can’t talk. The Voices understand them fine. [why are you here.]</p><p>The Voices give an account of the past however-long-it’s-been that’s very internally consistent and truthful by their standards. The sense of done-ness acquires an undertone of having known this would happen.</p><p>[you idiots. you let Cyrus win.] But they were going to come back for - [you are terrible at fighting things that can resist your manipulations. once you return. you will defeat him quickly.]</p><p>Return? [yes. there is still a chance. if you go now. you can fix this.]</p><p>But – the Voices don’t leave their journeys unfinished. That’s not even a rule, that’s one of the underlying assumptions their rules are built on. To leave a kid, even an empty puppet pretending to be a kid, early, that’s not even something they considered was possible. In a place like this, where that’s all they have, how can they -</p><p>And all of a sudden, Amber explodes. The vague annoyance that fills their presence is drowned out by despair and panic and a white-hot omnidirectional rage. [CAN’T YOU IDIOTS LEAVE YOUR GAMES FOR LONG ENOUGH TO SEE HOW SCREWED WE ARE! THAT ONE HAS WON! IT HAS CREATED THE WORLD IT ALWAYS WANTED! A WORLD WITHOUT SPIRIT! THE ONLY REASON THIS WORLD LOOKS LIKE ONE OF YOURS IS THAT YOU’RE MAKING IT THAT WAY!]</p><p>[WE CAME HERE HOPING THAT YOU’D BE ABLE TO PULL SOME MIRACLE OUT OF THE DISTORTION AND FIX THIS! BUT YOU’RE JUST ACTING OUT YOUR BANAL STORY!  DO YOU THINK YOU’RE IMMUNE! IT’S ALREADY GRINDING AWAY AT YOU! IF YOU HANG AROUND HERE YOU WILL BE ERASED! JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE! ALL THAT WILL BE LEFT WILL BE A WORLD WHERE NOTHING GROWS OR EVOLVES OR CHANGES!]</p><p>The Voices try to say that there’s nothing Cyrus (or whoever Amber’s talking about) can do to them, but then they actually look inward. Some of the Voices are gone. Not ignoring the physical world, not playing pinball, not napping, <em>gone</em>. Eroded away, like they were never there in the first place.</p><p>The Voices are beings of pure spirit. It would be hard for them to exist in a world without it even if that world wasn’t trying to kill them.</p><p>Even Amber - Amber is coming apart. Laws of physics, woven together into a will, separating into empty components – [RUN! YOU IDIOTS!]</p><p>As the Voices leave the empty world, the structure they built on top of it begins to fall away. There was just enough flexibility put in to trick the Voices into falling into a trap. Beyond that... An empty, still planet. An empty, unchanging universe. The void is emptier, because duh, but it’s somehow less hopeless.</p><p>The Voices briefly argue about which way Izzy is, but then they hear a faint tune. It sounds like adventure and battles and saving the world. The Voices follow it, until –</p><p>In Izzy’s head, the Voices go from murmuring glumly about grinding to whooping and cheering and congratulating themselves in the space of a second. ‘Are you feeling quite all right?’ <em>YEAH HELL YEAH FUCK YEAH WE GOT A ZAPDOS!</em></p><p>The reset timeline is back. They have another chance. (Pity Amber’s dead.)</p><p>...</p><p>. . .</p><p>.        .        .</p><p>She opens her eyes. For the first time in her husk of a life, she looks up at the sky and actually processes what’s there. The grass. The trees. The wind on her arms. Herself.</p><p>If she is looking out at the world, that means ‘she’ is something that is real.</p><p>If she is, then (‘All right, what’s your name?’) there must be a word for her. ‘May’ sounds like a word for the thing she does. She needs something else.</p><p>‘Marina’, she eventually settles on. Then she gets back on her bike, the lone soul in an empty world.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This is still canon, and it's also where a lot of my thoughts about what was going on behind the scenes, especially wrt the fossil gods, started to solidify. There's an old deep story unknown to all at work in the background of the background of TPP, and this is the closest the Voices have come to it so far. Definitely gonna contrive an excuse to bring back the Metronome world/world without spirit someday.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Reasons I was Hype for GBB2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Written just before Gauntlet Blaze Black 2 started.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Reason the first: BW? What BW?</p><p>Not gonna say terribly much on this one, because (1) you guys already know and (2) it’s the sort of big obvious mystery that will probably generate a consensus explanation I can steal. Hinding out what that explanation is, though? <em>Hype</em>.</p><p>What happened two years ago? Was it something we’d recognise as BW? How does it relate temporally to the rest of the Gauntlet? What did Team Plasma do? Who is N? Was there a Hilbert or Hilda? Were they a host?</p><p>Reason the second: MASSIVE TIMESKIP</p><p>This bit is basically only relevant to me, but I can’t not talk about it, it’s too important. Remember how I said that I imagine OriEme taking place like a decade after OriCrys? And that, timeline nonsense notwithstanding, OriPlat takes place around the same time? Well. OriBlack and OBB2 happen a generation after that.</p><p>The timeline has been rebuilt twice. The world’s measurable level of extraness has shot up massively. There are cities where there once was empty desert, and the first generation that has never known a pre-Voices world is entering middle age, and in a world where absolutely none of that happened, all that stuff about how N’s Hoenn shouldn’t look like Girl A’s Hoenn applies times a thousand. Most of the people in this region should never have been born, and yet, Unova looks - maybe not the same, but way too familiar.</p><p>I suspect things are happening faster than in the OT, though I can’t say by how much. Why this is happening, is a theme I will absolutely contrive an excuse to explore this coming season, assuming the reset timeline survives that long. This Gauntlet has been an absolutely wild ride.</p><p>Reason the third: Fossil gods fossil gods FOSSIL GODS</p><p>If, like in GPlat, we have to beat the E4 rematch to beat the game, that makes a lot of the postgame fall into my definition of canon. As such, if, before the next-run timer goes back up, the Voices were to rez a fossil... This didn’t happen in GPlat because extremely tedious minigame, but in GBB2 all we have to do is talk to a guy, and if we do...</p><p>As of the end of GPlat, the fossil gods are still dormant. Tossing and turning in their sleep, maybe, but still dormant. N’s been able to draw little bits of Root and Claw out past the seal, and if OT!Red ever escaped from glitchjail he’s probably doing the same thing with Helix. The seal, however, remains. It’s at a fraction of the power it was when it was made, and the fossil gods are going to break through it eventually.</p><p>That ‘eventually’ is on a fossil god timescale, though. No reason to think it’ll happen within the lifetime of human civilisation, and that’s honestly probably for the best. Being locked in sensory shutdown for millions of years has driven the fossil gods utterly insane, and even if they weren’t, well, they got sealed for multiple very good reasons. If they can slowly climb back to reality, they’ll be much better off, as will the biosphere. And even if you’re OT!Red and you don’t care about that, gathering up enough power to break the seal is kinda hard in the reset timeline. It’s just too chill around here.</p><p>So. The resurrection of the fossil gods is likely to be a long-term process, unless the Voices, who are incapable of planning in anything like the long term and are basically omnipotent, get involved. If they push in the right places, they could easily break open the seal, and then :insert all of Reddo’s nightmares here: Even if we don’t rez a fossil in BB2, GX kid will have easy access to one, and we haven’t had a Gen 6 fossil in the Hall of Fame yet.</p><p>Either way, if the fossil gods wake up, there will be an important difference with the OT. Amber, their babysitter and guide and older sibling, who loves the world the fossil gods made and is willing to do anything to stop them destroying it, won’t be there. As mentioned on April Fool’s Day, they are extremely dead.</p><p>Reason the fourth: the PWT</p><p>SPEAKING OF THINGS THAT ARE EXTREMELY DEAD, past hosts always come out to play at the PWT. They weren’t stopped by dimensional barriers in RW2, they’re not going to be stopped by their timeline having been destroyed. This is mostly a question for us doing the reset timeline theory. Where did all these guys come from?</p><p>For me, the Voices being immune to everything can only explain so much. It definitely doesn’t explain how the pokémon survived. There’s something else going on here. I can’t wait to figure out what.</p><p>Reason the fifth, and final: B2W2. just B2W2</p><p>So much happens in B2W2. even more in BB2. It feels like the entire pre-Gen-5 pokéverse shows up in Unova all at once. B2W2 runs are always really really important, the hinges their timelines turn on.</p><p>OBB2 is the culmination of the OT, the new world everyone built together coming into its own. Literally everyone teams up to fight Ghetsis, all the secrets of everything that’s happened since the fossil gods’ return are revealed, and the last remnants of the old order are thrown away. Nothing will ever be the same again. RW2 is an epic, the story of a region freed. Freed from the endless cold, free from a fifteen-way evil team war, freed from the light of Necrozma, not that anyone knew who that was at the time. Beyond the mountains lies a machine for granting wishes, and a covert organisation who will eventually become US’ Rainbow Rockets. B2W2 runs are always full of plot threads and arcs, always super relevant to the metaplot, and now?</p><p>Reddo’s nightmares, the battle of Mt. Silver, N’s mysterious motives, Izzy’s summoned gods, just enough of a glitch presence that you never forget they’re there, Maxie and Archie nearly ending the world by accident, Cyrus nearly ending the world on purpose (for all anyone knows, Cyrus is still out there), lists of phone contacts, nervous email conversations between professors, a pokédex project that was abruptly cancelled, champions constantly on watch, glitchmancers and channellers and whatever N is and hosts of the Voices, both old and new, the things that Izzy saw that scared her into hiding in the snow, Cici’s gambit to save his pokémon, Kay’s path through time, the music in the void, the tiny worlds as yet unexplained, the world without spirit, a story unknown to all…</p><p>Yeah, I’m bringing a lot of plot irons to the GBB2 fire, and I can’t wait to see how it all ends. (GX will mostly be post-GBB2 cleanup, calling it now.)</p><p>[BB2!Ghetsis having Drive on his team] explains so much! I think I’ve decided that Amber remembers the OT, which means that Drive does as well. With Amber down, they’re the last one knows what it all might mean. <em>Hyyyyyyyyype!</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Half the stuff on this list ended up not being relevant or not happening the way I was expecting them to. I loved GBB2 anyway, and all the things that happened that I didn't even know to be hype for when I wrote this. This list isn't precisely canon, but I did use a lot of the ideas in here going forward.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Another Kind of Voice-Possession</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Written in early Gauntlet Blaze Black 2, in a couple of bursts.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>POSSESSION! The idea came into my head: I assumed that Cal was channelling the past hosts, back in GCrys; was still his sprite. I know that the past hosts survived the destruction of the OT, because the Voices are immune to everything, but their bodies sure didn’t. Exactly how and why the Voices’ past hosts have taken over the PWT is something I’ve been trying to figure out. Going from basically just Red in the reset timeline, to the entire big host party... It felt kinda jarring. Not really fitting the reset timeline’s tone.</p><p>But! What if the hosts are possessing the normal PWT attendees? It’d explain why the only person who’s noticed that Sabrina is actually Alice is Reese. She’s wearing Sabrina’s body, but the Voices know the souls of their old kids anywhere. And, this way, the reset timeline doesn’t feel so abruptly interrupted.</p><p>Still, I’m a little hesitant of making it mitzicanon, because, like, if all the original PWT entrants are possessed, that means the former hosts are possessing a loooot of people, including every single Unova (and Hoenn, for that matter) gym leader, as well as a whole mess of champions, and if that’s the case...</p><p>The idea that the former hosts are the antagonists of GBB2 has been hovering around the back of my headspace for a while. I’m somewhat hesitant to take that plunge. What do you guys think?</p><p>Maybe not necessarily the Unova leaders. There’s a lot of guys at the PWT. If I do end up doing this, there will be a Table.</p><p>Been thinking about it: slight revision of the concept.</p><p>Sabrina has a voice in her head. One of the Voices. Specifically, Alice, some kind of researcher who claims to be from the dead timeline Reddo occasionally yells about. This state of affairs is entirely of Sabrina’s own choosing. There were negotiations. There may have been a written contract.</p><p>The former host ghosts made explicit contact with the various important people converging on Unova on account of the Ghetsis situation, and now every one of the gym leaders has an additional Voice in their head. Mostly they act in an advisory position, though some are more annoying about it than others. Occasionally they switch over to do as-yet-unspecified stuff.</p><p>But even so, the question still remains: why are the former hosts here? And what are they trying to do?</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The PWT didn't turn out how I expected, so I ended up (mostly) dropping this idea. Did manage to make the former hosts the final boss of GBB2, though!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. What N Did Before GBB2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Written mid-Gauntlet Blaze Black 2.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Notes on what may have happened two years ago:</p><p>Their name was N. Or their nickname, anyway; they didn’t seem to have a real name. They were a host of the Voices, at around the same time as Isabelle - you know, the globetrotting legendary collector - but they’d aged a lot less than she had since then.  </p><p>They had opinions on the relationship between humans and pokémon, and somehow-accurate information they seemed to have pulled out of nowhere. They formed an organisation, with sages and footsoldiers and preaching, to enact their goals. They named it Plasma.</p><p>Unova was supposed to be Plasma’s big break. a jumping-off point to change the world from. Dragons and prophecies and ancient kings... But it all kinda fell apart.</p><p>N didn’t try to take over the region. Well, they did, but they weren’t, like, invading it. They went house to house, and they built their powerbase, and they began to convert the region to their ideals – it was working! There were those, humans and pokémon, who were unreceptive to N’s ideas, but they were a shrinking faction. But...</p><p>It’s a long, torrid story of betrayal and corruption, that led into a fast and brutal interfaction civil war. When the dust settled, Team Plasma had split in two. There‘s N’s faction, who have given up their dreams <strike>for now</strike> and are focusing on making the world a better place in small, immediate ways, and there’s Ghetsis’ faction, who aim to take over the world.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>It's very short, but it's also too big/relevant for the snippets, I think. Background details have changed a little, but it's still mostly canon.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. The End of Reese's Journey</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Written just after the end of Gauntlet Blaze Black 2.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Reese! IDs as male, but uses she/her pronouns. Incredibly flamboyant feminine gender presentation. The sort of person who always signs off conversations with the heart emoji and uses the voices’ bullshit powers to constantly surround herself in sparkles. Supremely gay, has a crush on Marlon. For all her flashiness, her personality is surprisingly down-to-earth. She does what she wants, without caring what people think about it. Screw gender roles, screw the plot, Reese is exactly who she wants to be.</p><p>She’s super uninterested in the Pokémon League, the only reason she ends up doing it is because the Voices want to and she likes them. Her true passion is movie-making, which the Voices are at first suspicious of but get incredibly into. Catching lots of pokémon is part of that. She uses a lot of different mon while acting, so it’s good to have data on them. As far as Reese is concerned, the plot of her journey is about the trials and tribulations of her movie career, from commercial extra to the biggest name in Pokéstar. Training pokémon actors, putting together scripts, battling studio heads, brand management... It’s not the sort of pokémon journey the Voices are used to, but like I said, they get into it.</p><p>Yang’s doing something the Voices would understand a lot better. That’s his thing, you know? If he wants his pokémon journey to be repairing the damage left by the Plasma incident, fighting gym leaders and Neo Plasma cells... It’s not what Reese wants to do, but she doesn’t think less of him for doing it. They keep in touch. And then the war starts.</p><p>There’s... a lot of stuff, going on in the background of GBB2. Reese is aggressively uninterested. She keeps running past events and people that would be massive plot points in any other run. The two Team Plasmas. A rival actress who is very obviously up to something and has a former host of the Voices in her head. A boy and a girl from Nimbasa City, heavily involved in what happened two years ago. Colress and Genesect.</p><p>(Sabrina’s the only possessed gym leader, it’s a channeller thing. Hilda’s from the Nimbasa streets, but Hilbert appeared out of nowhere a few years back. There’s something about his eyes...)</p><p>Reese could not give less of a shit. As the Team Plasma civil war engulfs the region, she keeps making movies and collecting pokémon. ‘You’re a strong trainer!’ Yang yells. ‘Don’t you have a duty to help stop Team Plasma?!’ ‘Nope,’ says Reese. He yells, she snarks. Their XTransceiver conversations are all really nasty arguments these days.</p><p>Even during the Battle of Opelucid, Reese goes down to the Relic Castle and hunts for fossils. It’s kind of a liminal space, so by the end of it Reese knows more about the current cosmic toddler situation than anyone except N and maybe S1!Red. She proceeds to do exactly nothing with this information. (For the record, she is aware Darkrai is doing something on the side. She’s not terribly interested in finding out what, though.)</p><p>This isn’t to say Reese never gets involved in the plot! Usually it’s because Yang dragged her into it, but not always. Once, she randomly walked into N and Ghetsis’ final confrontation and then beat Ghetsis up when she realised his cane was stopping her from catching Kyurem.</p><p>But yeah. Eventually things calm down, a little. Yang is still obviously rushed off his feet dealing with the aftermath, but he isn’t trying to beat back an immediate apocalypse any more. Reese and Yang start mending their relationship, little by little. They still get into arguments, usually about her darkrai, but they’re both better at pulling away once the conversation gets too tense. Reese travels the region, doing public appearances and on-site filming. Whenever things get too much, her and the Voices disappear into the wilderness to catch pokémon and chill.</p><p>(The Voices haven’t found a good opportunity to leave yet. It seems like Reese always has a new plan she needs their help with. They have no idea how long this kind of pokémon journey is supposed to take, or how you know when it ends.)</p><p>And then, one day, Reese is called out of nowhere by Juniper. She’s spoken to Juniper maybe twice? This is weird. Juniper congratulates her on how many pokémon she’s caught, and invites her to a meeting of pokédex holders from around the world. They’re meeting in this stadium south of Driftveil.</p><p>Reese concludes that it would be helpful for her global profile, maybe increase her popularity among the pokémon collector segment? She waits for a free point in her schedule, and then goes. Soon as she steps into the stadium, every door and window turns into a glitchy mess, and an army of pokémon jumps into the ring. Turns out, this was a trap.</p><p>Reese’s team is strong, and features much cheese, so the only real threats are the four former hosts of the Voices. There’s N, current boss of Team Plasma. In contact with the sealed fossil gods, may be trying to take over the world. They set most of this up, bullying Clay into letting them borrow the PWT stadium, providing lots of Plasmoids to seal the place off and possibly evacuate the city, and consulting Yang on the best way to bait Reese.</p><p>There’s Reddo, glitchmancer extraordinaire. Normally he has a massive beef with N but for now they’ve joined forces to take Reese down. He’s done a lot of maths to set up a space that nullifies several of the Voices’ bullshit powers and exploits others, most notably setting up a loop that heals everyone else’s pokémon whenever the Voices black out.</p><p>There’s Izzy, trainer of legends. Since the Voices left her, she’s travelled the world, stopping incipient legendary crises and making friends in very high places. Her unparalleled information network is how they found out about what Darkrai was doing. She made the call to stop it in its tracks before it could use the Voices to destroy the world.</p><p>And there’s Dipper. No one’s quite sure why he’s here, to be honest.</p><p>They kick Reese’s ass. They kick Reese’s ass a lot. None of the ways the Voices usually deal with situations like this are working, and they grow ever more frustrated as they lose again and again. Some of the Voices console themselves by stealing entries from Izzy’s pokédex. Reddo notices what they’re doing and programs in a quick and dirty Voices trap. (He doesn’t really have anything against the Voices, it’s just that as soon as they leave Reese Darkrai can be stopped.)</p><p>Eventually, frustrated, tired, and angry, the Voices result to that most detestable of their methods: <em>democracy</em>. Bitching all the while, they coordinate their way to victory. (Throughout the final battle, Izzy’s all, ‘You have to understand! Your darkrai is aiming to paralyse the planet towards who knows what end! If you were to release it-‘ and Reese is all OH THAT’S RICH COMING FROM YOU! Reese may not care about the plot, but she has paid enough attention, and had enough conversations with Colress, to know the vague outlines of the story unknown to all.)</p><p>And finally, <em>finally</em>, Reese wins. The haze over the doors breaks. Reese scowls at everyone, marches towards the exit -</p><p>There’s this ripping sound. Reese turns around. Right on the jumbotron, something is tearing a hole in reality.</p><p>Reese isn’t entirely sure what happens next. It’s all panic and screaming and fire. She ends up getting into a bunch of fights with former hosts of the Voices and flickering haze-constructs of their pokémon. They’re mostly friendly, though the one that used to ride around in Sabrina apologises for the mess.</p><p>Eventually Reese cuts through the chaos to the jumbotron. Hovering in front of the hole in reality, at the nexus of a network of spiralling fractals, glowing with arcane light, is Red. The original Red. He notices Reese, and tentacle-like scars in reality stab down at the Voices. They try to get out of this by forcing a pokémon battle, which they win because Red isn’t the best trainer, but this is still a space where their powers don’t quite work properly. Instead of surrendering, Red sends down a forest of scythes -</p><p>And Reese wakes up in her bed, at home in Aspertia. The Voices are gone. At first she assumes it was all a dream, but her pokédex still has the extra entries, and the Kanto section still makes her head hurt. They’ve scrawled something new onto the back of her trainer card, which she eventually deciphers as BYE REESE. So. That happened.</p><p>Reese takes a shower and gets dressed. She goes to the front door, past her mom watching TV (‘-present as far as Chargestone Cave. As Nimbasa prepares to evacuate-‘) to the front door, and her pokéball belt. She picks out Darkrai. ‘You and me,’ she says, ‘are going to have a <em>chat</em>.’</p><p>And that’s my GBB2 lore! A lot of stuff happened, but most of it was offscreen. I’ll wait for X to say exactly what (and will probably adjust it as the runs go by) but GBB2 is just as vital metaplotwise as OBB2 and RW2, it’s just. The Voices skipped most of it.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I love Reese. Best boy, if only because the position of best girl is forever occupied by Baba. This is still how I think about the GBB2 run, and I'm pleased to say I do know what happened at the PWT now.</p><p>... This is basically just a chapter of Gauntlet Disasters, isn't it.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Esther and Sail are Friends</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Written about halfway through Gauntlet X, which was still, like, two days in.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Esther is young, for a host. Exactly how old she is I’m not sure, but the official Mitzi average host age is thirteen, so maybe nine or ten? That’s young for going on a pokémon journey in Kalos, but not that young? Normally she’d be allowed to go on a pokémon journey by herself, but these aren’t exactly normal times?</p><p>See, there was this thing. In Unova. And, well. Even an ocean away, the world is a significantly more dangerous place. (Team Flare’s foundation has something to do with all that plot Reese skipped, like, tangentially. Red, what did you dooooo????)</p><p>But Esther still wants to go on a pokémon journey, and staying at home really doesn’t suit her, so her mother waits until a bunch of kids are getting ready to head off, and lets Esther go along with them. The oldest member of the group, Calem, is acting as a kind of babysitter to the others. Esther resents this. He was supposed to be keeping her out of trouble, but then Voices, and now she’s defending the Power Plant from Team Flare.</p><p>Mentioning the Voices brings me to my other lore point.</p><p>Okay, so, if you were to make a list of everyone connected to the reset timeline and order them by how much they knew about the metaplot, Esther would be at the very bottom. She kind of dismisses the Voices’ talk about gods and glitches and the fate of the world as more of their delusional rambling. So, when she gets given a rock the Glittering Cave research team is trying to hide from Team Flare, she doesn’t expect to hear someone else behind it.</p><p>The one called Sail in the other timeline, inverse face of [disjuncture/synthesis], has spent most of its life sealed in the dark. Given its association with alternate dimensions, it’s not as trapped as some of its older siblings, but still. In the other timeline, after it was unsealed, it ended up as this snobby wannabe princess, on a never-ending quest to be taken seriously, bullying Jaw into going along with its plans, embedding itself in the Lumiose fashion scene. None of that happened here. That persona never grew to cover the fear.</p><p> Sail is <em>absolutely terrified</em> of the older fossil gods. So is Jaw, but Jaw deals with its fear by hiding in the superstrings and playing with Dialga. Sail can’t scatter itself like that, it has to synthesise. I’m toying with the idea that something reasonably close to the unsealing of the fossil gods happened either during or immediately after GBB2. If it has, I’d say the reason Sail and Jaw weren’t in the Relic Castle was because they were hiding. The empty void, or a world full of monsters, until –</p><p>Like I said, Esther knows absolutely none of this. What she does manage to pick up from the presence in the rock, she interprets in a rather unorthodox manner. ‘Have you never had a friend before?’</p><p>The Voices give Esther the power to pull Sail out of the void, completely breaking the seal and causing absolute chaos for the people who care about that. Esther doesn’t know. Even if she did, she wouldn’t care. She’s too busy showing her new friend (who still doesn’t really have a name) what it’s like being a ten-year-old pokémon trainer.</p><p>Trying on hats, making jokes about the Voices, playing football with her pokémon, relaxing in the sun. Their relationship is picture-book wholesomeness. Two friends, both sheltered in their own ways, making their way in the world together.</p><p>The book is called ‘Esther and [hundreds of thousands of mathematical equations arranged into the shape of an amaura] are Friends’. Front cover shows Esther reading a book to an elegant fractal structure the size of a house.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>X went by so fast this is basically all the lore I managed to do for it. Eh, it's a nice epilogue, in context. Still canon.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. BONUS: あなたには僕が見えるか？ ft. Old Amber</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Here, have a bonus chapter. Companion piece to <a href="#section0007">A World Without Spirit</a>.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>So I lowkey think every Vocaloid song I've ever heard is about TPP, but occasionally one will just snap onto a character or event. During the Gauntlet, I started thinking that Unknown Mother Goose (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_CSdxSGfaA">original broadcast</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr5Csep6yFM">subbed reprint</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1f2TYTFOvo">a couple of choruses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1q-F0JgB-k">I've been listening to</a>) was about the Old Amber. I considered writing a filk, but (1) the lyrics fit Amber pretty well already (though I still ended up rewriting them, go figure) and (2) there are like two people who'd know what I was talking about. So I sort of... tried to write the PV that plays in my head whenever I hear this song? Whatever, I'll take any excuse to talk about the cosmic toddlers and their overworked babysitter, and Amber has a perspective on events no one else involved in the Gauntlet does.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>First, I’ll talk about what the fossil gods are and how they work. They’re essentially sapient bits of reality, laws of physics and mathematical ratios growing and weaving into ever-changing fractals over hundreds of millions of years. [chaos/order], [observed/unseen], [impulse/consideration], [imagination/observation], [disjuncture/synthesis]… In the deepest layers, they are all one, all the same sentient reality. They are everywhere, and everything.</p><p>Going up from that, of course, they split. First into five monads, made up of ever more complex and abstract aspects of spacetime, and then, near the surface, the monads split into dyads, inverted mirror images, complete opposites where they aren’t absolutely identical, each a thinking organ of the TPPverse itself.</p><p>The TPPverse is sentient because it’s a big dangerous multiverse out there and the [W H E E L] decided to give this particular subdimension some protection. Speaking of Fence Horse, while the fossil gods are some of the oldest and most powerful entities involved in TPP, they’re not at the top of the pyramid. They’re outranked by both Sinnoh legendary trios, Fence Horse, possibly Mew, and the Old Amber.</p><p>Amber isn’t a fossil god. They’re fossil god-<em>y</em>, certainly, omnipresence and fractals and all that, but they’re noticeably different. There’s something uncanny to the way their fractals undulate and recombine, an unnaturalness to their movements. Where the fossil gods are overemotional egomaniacal drama queens who never shut up, Amber, while not quite emotionless, never wavers from the perpetual done-ness that is their default state of being. Instead of a proper fossil anchor at the base of their being, they have this indistinct orangey lump with vague shadows inside it.</p><p>Weirdest of all, they don’t have any aspects or domains of their own. While all the fossil gods are gods of several things, from primordial chaos to game corners, Amber’s just kind of there. Since before Helix and Dome first left the abyssal trenches, Amber’s always been there. They break up fights and clean up messes and always, always watch the fossil gods and the world they made, silent, stable. The fossil gods think of them as more of a force of nature than a being with agency, the thing that whacks you in the metaphorical face when you’ve done something stupid.</p><p>They do have agency, though. Behind the metaphorical deadpan expression and the metaphorical aggrieved sighs, Amber has their own thoughts and opinions and goals and ideals. They just don’t let them out.</p><p>
  <em>If these thoughts were to be expressed, how would they resound within you?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Words are unnecessary ostentatious things, simply a mask on a stream of pure emotion</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Since you have so much life to create, what use is there for these pointless colours?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Waiting here, enraptured by your sound, until the whole world is filled with delight…</em>
</p><p>While the credits instrumental plays, let’s talk a little more about Amber.</p><p>When Amber says ‘you’ in the context of this song, they always mean the fossil gods. To Amber, the fossil gods (it’s legitimately unclear if Amber distinguishes between their individual forms) are the only things that really matter. There’s other stuff they have to pay attention to, of course, but that’s all just set dressing. For the record, Amber counts themselves among the set dressing. There’s a reason they never use the first person.</p><p>Or at least they wouldn’t, if they could talk. Amber’s even worse at abstract concepts and thinking about things that don’t exist than Helix and Dome, to the point where they can’t do language. Even by fossil god standards, their communication methods are crude; they’re all the equivalent of pointed glares and frustrated growls and shoving. The Voices still interpret all of this as speech, because of course they do.</p><p>It’s also not entirely correct to say Amber doesn’t have emotions. They have two! They work like a switch, ‘off’ and ‘on.’ ‘Off’ is Amber’s default mode, which after several hundred million years of dealing with the fossil gods’ shit is sheer solid done. On the very rare occasions when they flip to ‘on,’ things tend to blow up.</p><p>
  <em>The years roll past monotonously, you busy yourself with frivolous things</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Once again, that overplayed repetitive song echoes annoyingly all around</em>
</p><p>Most things don’t interest Amber. Stuff that doesn’t impact the fossil gods, they ignore. Stuff that does impact the fossil gods, they handle. Some of that stuff is more annoying to deal with than others, and some of <em>that</em> stuff is the Voices, who are somehow both infuriatingly chaotic and disgustingly predictable. They’re unreliable, is Amber’s biggest problem with them, closely followed by how they never ever shut up.</p><p>
  <em>If you express yourself in that way right now, what do you think the answer will be?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>If you’re pretending not to understand why, extend yourself and open your senses!</em>
</p><p>There’s a lot more stuff Amber has to keep track of nowadays. They’re used to having to stop the fossil gods from killing each other and destroying the world, less used to having to protect the fossil gods from that world. They just can’t understand how things below the fossil gods think. Fortunately, the fossil gods themselves <em>can</em> do that, and Amber’s been asking leading questions in an attempt to get these idiots to think through their actions for eons. There’s less collateral damage these days, more hypotheticals, but the way Amber manages the fossil gods hasn’t actually changed that much.</p><p>
  <em>Distant, reverberating, is the story unknown to all</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Quietly, you are defended, so that you may never hear it deep in the void</em>
</p><p>The fossil gods know nothing about some of what Amber deals with. The movements of entities who are as to the fossil gods what the fossil gods are to flies, errors in their construction deliberately placed at the beginning of the world… They’re impetuous and arrogant and very bad at backing down, and if they start a fight with something that could crush them everything Amber’s ever worked for will come to nothing. For their own safety, it’s better that they don’t know what’s out there.</p><p>
  <em>If an unheard and unwanted complaint is permitted, the constant struggle to keep all in balance</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Has caused so much to swell up that cannot be let out, only able to scream!</em>
</p><p>As mentioned earlier, Amber has been cleaning up after the fossil gods for hundreds of millions of years. Stopping them from breaking things they can’t fix or kicking off yet another mass extinction or starting petty squabble chain reactions is irritating enough, but they’re also constantly either finding or making crazy things that get them into ridiculous situations that Amber then has to somehow keep from destroying the world, this whole thing with the Voices is the dumbest it’s been in a while, yes, but it’s far from the only recent one, and <em>aaaaaaaaaagh!</em></p><p>
  <em>But even if you’re rejected by the world, a lifeline can be extended; thus</em>
</p><p>
  <em>These unnoticed thoughts once again reach out to you</em>
</p><p>If they’re such a pain in the cascade equations, why does Amber put up with the fossil gods? More to the point, why do they defend them? Why did they endanger absolutely everything to break them out of Bill’s PC? Why did they leap in front of OLDEN’s killing blow to protect Dome when it was the last fossil god left? The answer to that is… somewhat complicated.</p><p>
  <em>Can you see this? Can you see this?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>This thing, that you do nothing but throw junk at</em>
</p><p>Helix, Root, Skull, Cover, Jaw. Dome, Claw, Armour, Plume, Sail. They are capable of making glorious worlds, yes, but they also whine and fight and get offended super easily and break each other’s stuff, they’re an absolute pain to manage, and they treat Amber with barely disguised contempt at best. If Amber was the god of anything, they’d be the god of unpaid unappreciated babysitters.</p><p>
  <em>But if you’re starting to speak of love, and if you’re starting to wish for love</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Ah, perhaps that everything has given this a meaning?</em>
</p><p>And yet, Amber knows that the fossil gods are capable of being <em>better</em> than this. They’re capable of working together with the world around them, combining all their unique impulses to create something none of them could possibly find alone. Amber used to think they would never reach this point, but then the Voices arrived. With everything that’s happened since then…</p><p>Helix and Dome, bragging about and supporting and taking care of their Reds, the first beings outside themselves they consider people. Root and Claw, dancing and building and scheming at the heart of their networks of friends, no longer alone in the world. Skull and Armour, still competing at literally everything but able to laugh together at the end of the day. Cover and Plume, chattering constantly about things Amber doesn’t understand but happier than they’ve ever seen them. Jaw and Sail, forging out from behind their defences to find their own place in the world, beautifully and without fear. Amber can’t track how it happened, and they can’t figure out why, but somehow, they’ve reached their happy ending.</p><p>
  <em>Woah-oh-oh, woah-oh-oh woah-oh wah-oh-ah-oh…</em>
</p><p>There’s still a fair ways to go, of course, but for the first time ever the fossil gods see the world they could make and reach out to grasp it. They’re maturing, taking responsibility for themselves, observing the effects they have on the world around them and working to make that world right. They’ll always be idiots, always be loud and feckless and overconfident and quarrelsome, but they’re learning how to work past their flaws for the good of the world they were given. Amber is terrible at predicting the long-term future, but even they can tell that the harmonious world they dream of lies at the end of their path. All they have to do is lead the fossil gods to it</p><p>Except…</p><p>
  <em>Pick me up, pick me up again…</em>
</p><p>There was this thing OLDEN, you know? IT was actually pretty similar to Amber in construction, except with glitches instead of sap. Once the fossil gods burned the glitches away and Azure rescued Evan, all that was left were a few shards of rock, scattered here and there in the rebuilt world. Amber kept meaning to collect them and put them somewhere safe before the fossil gods did something stupid with them, but they never found the time, and then FUCKING COLRESS –</p><p>
  <em>Hey, while you’re expressing your love, what is that hiding behind you?!</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Beyond the seal that preserves the shards, stands a detestable lookalike</em>
</p><p>When Amber finds out about Drive, they absolutely lose their shit. Partially it’s the OLDEN thing, partially it’s the old dyadic hate, partially it’s a sense of <em>everything’s finally going according to plan WHY IS THAT THING SHOWING UP?!</em> For the first time since before they first detected Coverplume, Amber’s emotions flip ‘on’. It takes all the older fossil gods working together to pin them down and stop them from levelling Unova.</p><p>
  <em>If these thoughts are no longer hidden to you, how much colour are you able to see?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>This solitude cannot be broken down, after so long shouldering this burden!</em>
</p><p>The Drive incident changes the way the fossil gods look at Amber. They start conceiving of Amber as a person, with motivations and an inner world and all that. Amber does not like this at all. The fossil gods are second-guessing them now, criticizing their decisions, questioning their judgement, and ignoring them when they think they’re wrong. They’ve also started investigating Amber’s past, and Amber’s had to throw them lots of things they’ve never told them just to keep them off the scent of the really dangerous stuff. Even when the younger gods try to be empathetic, ask them if they want to do this or that – Amber’s never thought of themselves as a person before, they’re the thing that stops the idiots from being idiotic, they don’t know how to deal with this, and then things go from bad to unbelievably awful.</p><p>
  <em>Bits of the here-and-now are twisted and ripped out until at the end of it – lie-la-lie-lie!</em>
</p><p>Due to certain Voices-adjacent circumstances Amber probably knows more about than I do, the timeline gets ripped apart. Past, present, and future are changed and knocked out of order and finally start collapsing, and soon enough Amber is struggling to keep the fossil gods stable long enough to maybe find a way out –</p><p>
  <em>They who are responsible cast all of it aside and vanish into the void – bye-ba-bye-bye!</em>
</p><p>– but it’s not enough, and all the progress they make keeps slipping away, and by the time Amber realises the breakage is deliberate it’s far too late. Certain interested parties press the reset button on the TPPverse, reverting it to the way it was just before the Voices came; this does stop reality from collapsing completely but –</p><p>
  <em>The you they leave behind is once again broken, wailing in pain – why, oh why?</em>
</p><p>– the fossil gods have also been reverted to their pre-Voices state, locked in sensory deprivation for so long they’ve been driven insane. Even apart from that, they’ve lost all their character development, and the fossil gods who were sealed were their worst possible selves. Amber doesn’t know how to fix this, but they need to, because –</p><p>
  <em>Now more than ever before, this world needs your protection!</em>
</p><p>– the TPPverse has been attracting attention, and not everything’s been reset. There are things out there in the void, creeping closer, waiting for their opportunity, swarming. The fossil gods were created to fight off these things, but they can’t do that in their current state, and all of Amber’s other aces in the hole have vanished with the reset!</p><p>
  <em>Despite the pain from being stretched so close to breaking</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And the nonstop howling of the endless maelstrom of emotion</em>
</p><p>But they have Drive, and they have a job to do. Amber leaves Drive within the TPPverse to try to get the old universe back, or at least wake the fossil gods up, and dives into the void. Just like they did before they found Helix and Dome, they hunt abominations. Throughout desperate, brutal, and unforgiving battles, they come to a realisation. Something’s been manipulating events from outside the TPPverse for a very long time. Something familiar.</p><p>
  <em>If that perfect song can come into existence, allowing your wounds to gradually fester</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And cause you to rot away from the inside would be abhorrent!</em>
</p><p>Now, Amber knows where to aim. Even if it’s an absolute pain and it takes forever, the fossil gods will be able to recover from the reset, but if that one’s plans come to fruition, all will be lost. Like the weapon that one designed them to be, Amber launches themselves at their enemies, emotions blazing, edges unsheathed. No matter what, Amber will defend the fossil gods and the world they know they will make. They won’t let that one hurt them any more!</p><p>
  <em>Is it foolish to still love the world that was? Would you fail no matter how many times you tried?</em>
</p><p>And yet, they fail. Amber can do battles and hunts, but they’re too direct to do war. They get outflanked and surrounded, and that one lays a final piece. As that one’s plan moves ever closer to fruition, and spirit begins to leach out of the world, Amber wonders if any of this was worth it. Struggling so hard to keep everything in balance, for a pack of morons who never have and never will understand why? They’ve already wrecked the world almost beyond the point of no return once already, and in all likelihood they’ll do it again. What’s the point in even trying?</p><p>
  <em>But even so, all these thoughts you never knew are entrusted to that repeating song, one last time.</em>
</p><p>Everything, is the point. Amber loves the fossil gods. They would do anything for their sake, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how easy it would be to give up. They’re not great at tactics, and they have very few cards left to play, but there is one last thing they can think of to do. It is, appropriately, incredibly dumb.</p><p>
  <em>If you were here, what would you desire? If you were here, what would you choose?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thinking of what hasn’t been has never been easy for us, but</em>
</p><p>They try to imagine what the fossil gods became in the original timeline, so much closer to their best possible selves, the beings Amber would happily follow into the light. What would they want Amber to do here? Amber basically doesn’t have an imagination, but they know those fossil gods always wanted to protect their world. They can guess.</p><p>
  <em>Can you see us? Can you see us?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Can you see the distant light of the brilliant future ahead?</em>
</p><p>Amber is a little concerned that in a world without them the fossil gods may devolve into pointless fights and massive collateral damage. But they’re capable of being better than that, Amber knows now, and they weren’t what caused the fossil gods to change. It was the Voices and the world they woke up in and everything that happened there, and those will all be there afterwards. Even if it was partially something Amber did, Drive is there, and ai’s much more on the level than they used to fear. And the world will regain its spirit, and the possibility of a future.</p><p>
  <em>Woah-oh-oh, woah-oh-oh woah-oh wah-oh-ah-oh…</em>
</p><p>As the Voices flail around in a replica Hoenn in a world without meaning, Amber tears a hole in their trap from the outside. The Voices find them instantly, and after one last instance of infuriating obtuseness they go along with Amber’s plan.</p><p>They stream out through the hole in reality. The cancer is still in its early stages, if the Voices can cut it off now… Doing so may be technically impossible, but that’s the reason Amber’s using the Voices. Unreliable as they are, Amber knows that on some level they’ve grown to love their world.</p><p>From here on out, relying on that is all Amber has. Already, the rot is seeping into them. Equations separating, fractals unravelling, amber disintegrating in the empty light. The world without spirit isn’t just designed to not have fossil gods, being there is actively destructive to them. And Amber is close enough to count.</p><p>As that one slowly picks apart the laws and will and memories that went into their creation, as Wing and Thorax separate for the last time, as the shattered fossils within Amber’s anchor dissolve, they have one last thing to say.</p><p>
  <em>Hey, if you ever sing of your love again, that’d be proof our purpose was true</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Words may be pointless insufficient things, but our dream continues</em>
</p><p>
  <em>If we were to speak of these, all we would say lies within our song</em>
</p><p>
  <em>As we quietly hum the beat of the story unknown to all.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'm gonna keep Amber dead for as long as I can. Amber dying is the most interesting thing story-wise that's happened with the fossil gods in forever. It's a great plot point, and I fully intend to milk it for all it's worth.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Red Snippets</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Bits and bobs written throughout and just after the Red run, usually as part of conversations. Almost none of them are still headcanon, but having a record of how my lore evolved is a good thing, I think.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>FM stands for Final Mix; FM!Red is what I called Reddo before I started calling him Reddo.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>My current [= day 2] probable lore interpretation [of the GRed host being named Red] involves alternate universes, but we’ll see!</p><p> </p><p>I will go to my grave assuming our fish is Baba. I’m going to work under the assumption that every last thing in the Gauntlet that could possibly be a reference to a previous run is that, by the by. Calling our host Red cracked me up and I wanna push this concept as far as it’ll go; in other words, I think it’s funny.</p><p> </p><p>It’s bold of you to assume there’s even a timeline at this point. Current [= still day 2] mitzilore sees [the reset timeline theory] more as reinstating the timeline than resetting it. Like, S6 was about the timeline being thoroughly trashed by TIME TRAVEL, and the Gauntlet is... someone’s attempt to fix it. This is basically the same plot as S2, so I’m on the fence.</p><p> </p><p>Okay this is definitely Red. Specifically, immediately post-Voices, all-glory-to-the-Helix, mad-cackling-and-blood-sacrifice Red. Darkest timeline Red, which is a scary thought, because I thought OG!Red was darkest timeline Red.</p><p> </p><p>Maybe [the recatchable released mon] escaped from Red, or maybe they’re weird TIME TRAVEL ghosts.</p><p> </p><p>... Are we <em>sure</em> this Red isn’t Kay in a trenchcoat?</p><p> </p><p>Voices try to bullshit powers their way out of the Wild Ride [by doing the marowak skip], fail. Actually, this kinda implies that the new reality/timeline/whatever is less glitchy than the old one.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the what-happened-in-S6 ramble.]</p><p> </p><p>We’ve been to Cinnabar a bunch, but Helix is still sitting in our bag... Not rezzing the fossil at all would be interesting. The whole fuckin’ timeline rests on Red rezzing Helix. If that doesn’t happen... (I mean, it still might, but Red not wanting to is super interesting.)</p><p> </p><p>Wait wait wait wait wait. A general fuck-you to destiny? Super cavalier with the lives of his mon? Knows more than a thing or two about glitches? Obsessed with Mewtwo? This kid isn’t Kay. This kid is fucking Larry.</p><p>The angle I’ll probably take is that Larry was an alt!Red all along and this is his origin story, but yeah, the world is not ready for Shuumatsu Shounen Larry.</p><p> </p><p>Fanart consensus seems to be [that dodrio flies] by using its necks like helicopter blades.</p><p> </p><p>No matter how different this Red is, some things [like Route 22 ledge-induced frustration] never change.</p><p>HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA [forcing stairs to appear in the Route 22 ledge is the] BEST POSSIBLE USE OF REALITY WARPING POWERS (Thought: new Red may be able to control the Voices and their bullshit superpowers more than usual.)</p><p> </p><p>[After catching Mewtwo and naming it Ass:] Yeah this is absolutely Larry.</p><p> </p><p>Aw. Well, RBY’s probably the game in the series least likely to count postgame, so I’ll be ignoring [the postgame Helix resurrection.]</p><p>Esh, it’s a RBY postgame intermission, I was gonna ignore it anyway.</p><p> </p><p>If someone did this to unfuck the timeline it went horribly wrong almost immediately [what with the glitch-induced crash] and I love it.</p><p> </p><p>And no sooner have the powers-that-be created a new reality without any of this [RUM-related] nonsense than the-Red-that-will-become-Larry is breaking it in new and interesting ways.</p><p> </p><p>I’m just excited to explore a timeline where the single most important event in the history of the world straight up did not happen.</p><p> </p><p>My theory is that the postgame is sort of a sped-up collage of FM!Red’s work over, like, a decade.</p><p> </p><p>I’m kinda hoping FM!Red isn’t atop Mt. Silver. For someone so determined to break the shackles of destiny, it’d seem tragic for his story to end in the traditional way.</p><p> </p><p>The reset-timeline gauntlet theory was basically what Bill was trying to make.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the first chapter of Gauntlet Disasters.]</p><p> </p><p>Yeah, Reddo’s dipping into AJ’s memories [in that chapter.] Mt. Silver. The other Red.</p><p> </p><p>Honestly if getting incredibly drunk is a prerequisite for high-level glitchmancy it would explain a lot. ‘Apprentice, travelling the void between the worlds and communing with things that should not be can leave you with lasting mental scars. If you want to get anything useful done, you’ll need to cushion the blow.’ :opens a bottle of dollar-store hooch:</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>As the runs rolled on and my idea of how the reset timeline related to the OT developed, I grew less certain that Reddo was Larry. These days, I'm all but convinced he isn't, but I still might pick up that plot thread again later. Maybe.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Crystal Snippets</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Bits and bobs written throughout and just after Crystal. Again, they're here mostly to show the way my lore evolved, though unlike the Red snips they are mostly still canon. Also unlike the Red snips, they're not as focused on the Crystal run itself, though everything in here is still relevant to the Gauntlet.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I like to think [Dipper] knows AJ as ‘that crazy kid who lives in the mountains and tried to bite me once.’ Kanto is not on fire.</p><p> </p><p>As Elm’s student/aide, it’s naturally Dippy (or Dr. Pokémon, as he insists people call him instead of his embarrassing real name) that gets given Oak’s student’s old pokédex after Red vanishes into the woods. He’s a bright kid, who helps Elm with his research a lot, but he could stand to get out more. In the original timeline he got murdered by Helix cultists. Or angry skarmory, haven’t decided.</p><p> </p><p>[After the idea of Dipper becoming a monk is thrown around] Dippy’s just going to join up with whichever weirdos he runs into, isn’t he? Ten to one he joins Team Rocket.</p><p> </p><p>Dippy ‘I am a SCIENTIST’ Kay. I would say I’d like to see him science-fight Alek, but Alek would stomp him into the dirt. Not even in a pokémon battle, just a science-off. Dippy would lose.</p><p>For serious though, I’ve started thinking of the reset timeline as a place that’s way less extra than the TPPverse turned out.</p><p>:Red and Reddo are having a massive god/glitch fight over Kanto. Reddo’s Blue and Abe are watching. FM!Blue is trying very hard not to panic, Abe is mostly annoyed:</p><p>Abe: If you can get your Red to stop, I’m pretty sure I can stop mine.</p><p>Blue: ...Okay? :reaches for pokégear:</p><p>Abe: :grows seven glitchy wings, shoots into the air on a beam of light, screams in an unknowable language, has crossed half of Kanto before Blue has pressed any buttons:</p><p>Abe and Red just came here to buy soda!</p><p> </p><p>Honestly I think GCrys has been pretty buoyant so far. Just a kid, a leaf, two waddleplants, a rock snake, and an egg, having adventures together. Given how dark S1!Crystal was, I’m appreciating the contrast.</p><p> </p><p>If Red’s quirk was never rezzing the helix fossil, Dipper’s is never having a full team. Also always having a bellsprout, for some reason. I like the idea of this kid being kind of bad at pokémon battles.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the glitchmancy/worst pun ramble.]</p><p> </p><p>Kid straight up isn’t catching huge numbers of mon, which could be an interesting character beat. Maybe he wants to get to know them all individually?</p><p> </p><p>[Dipper’s politoed is] the second coming of Tux.</p><p> </p><p>Looks like Dipper has started to catch lots of mon now, possibly accidentally, or at the whim of the Voices.</p><p>[Haji says he might be doing it because he has nothing else to do.]</p><p>‘I think I’ve reached the limits of my ability to explore Johto, so I might as well do my dex’?</p><p> </p><p>I’ve been toying around with the idea that the whole TIME TRAVEL mess was set off by Cici trying to save his pokémon for a while. If this is a reset timeline - well, I say it’s the debuggers, but Cici...</p><p> </p><p>Imagining Reddo recruiting AJ for, like, wilderness guide purposes. An AJ who’s actually well-adjusted and not a ball of hate would be great.     </p><p> </p><p>Potential chapter 2 of Gauntlet Disasters title: In Which the Second Host of the Voices Just Does Not Want to be a Pokémon Trainer. Idea is that early on Dipper wanted to go his own way~ and do science~ and didn’t care about having three grass types and a disobedient onix for a team~ Something happens - not sure what yet - and he knuckles down to actually, like, find Reddo like he’s supposed to. Probably involves Ass.</p><p>Alternate title: In Which the Voices Find Themselves in the Slightly Uncomfortable Position of Being More Competent Than Their Host</p><p>Pokémon training is the lens through which the Voices interpret the universe. Having a host who could take it or leave it is... unusual. The Voices have had reluctant hosts before, but never one this... friendly.</p><p> </p><p>[After Dipper killed Suicune] Dipper seems more the, ‘Ah, I guess I didn’t really click with Suicune. Oh well,’ type than, ‘NO GODS NO KINGS ONLY MON :decapitates:’ It’s not hard to be more chill than AJ.</p><p> </p><p>I get the feeling Reddo made some kinda briefing packet [about the Voices] he sent round the professors But yeah, no one here knows that when you see a kid with purple eyes and janky movements you give them a snack and then stay out of their way.</p><p>… Wondering if we can’t lore the increasing number of NPCs that cooperate with the player as the generations roll on as people getting more used to the Voices and willing to help them.</p><p> </p><p>I’m now mentally calling rival Elijah.</p><p> </p><p>[After getting ditched by Celebi] ‘I’m not paid enough to deal with this,’ or, alternately, ‘The kid’s doing okay, looks like! I’ve got other stuff to take care of, I’ll catch you guys later!’</p><p> </p><p>My first instinct is to have [Dipper’s sprite] lugging a big book around like a schoolkid. I get a very ‘elementary school science fair’ vibe from him.</p><p> </p><p>Abe[!muse] may have done some expositing to FM!Blue[!muse], about dyadic balance and true friends.</p><p> </p><p>I’m going to read [Dipper wandering around Johto after getting his ass kicked by Lance] as the Voices trying to brainstorm a Lance plan and Dipper taking the opportunity to do some scientific study.</p><p>I see it more as the Voices getting so caught up in arguing over strategy they don’t notice Dipper’s left the Indigo Plateau until he’s in Ecruteak, and once he’s there... Well, it’s nice to get some air. Might as well wander around</p><p> </p><p>I’m just glad Kay got a look in [at the Trainer House.] This has... implications for the reset timeline. Granted, if any host could survive the reset (even if less-than-intact) it’d be Kay, but still.</p><p> </p><p>Cal-Kay - ‘I travelled out here just so I could battle you.’</p><p> </p><p>I like how whenever Dipper gets stuck on a boss he inevitably ends up touring Johto.</p><p> </p><p>The fuck kind of crazy dead-timeline-spirit-channelling shit is going on in the Trainer House?! The fact that the kids are here specifically to fight Dipper is... potentially disturbing.</p><p> </p><p>Reddo’s worst nightmare has come to reality. My read is that we accidentally walked in on an epic Red battle. After we kicked a weakened Reddo’s ass, he goes, ‘Okay, I can’t beat him. Maybe you can,’ and heals our team. Given that I’m headcanoning that both Reds knew Dipper before the Voices, this should be interesting.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the Mt. Silver fight ramble.]</p><p> </p><p>I don’t read Sky [from Storm Silver] as a medium, so I can’t comment on [whatever TK was talking about here,] but they might have similar low-key practical knowledge of glitchmancy?</p><p> </p><p>With his job of finding Red (and possibly saving the world? He’s not exactly sure what happened there) at long last complete, Dipper is finally returning to his first love: pokémon observation.</p><p>Translation: chat is badge hunting.</p><p> </p><p>Kay: the guy who keeps the plot moving. Perhaps the only member of the Debuggers who survived the jump to the new timeline. Alignment and motivations: dubious. I want him to be an alt Red really badly, but I think he’s got more to do with the dreamscape travellers from the S4verse. The origins and nature of Kay’s powers are the biggest question mark of S6 for me, and that’s including RUM.</p><p> </p><p>Today in weird coincidences: AJ also beat Red by his last pokémon using a water-type HM move while Bird Jesus was charging Sky Attack.</p><p> </p><p>Uh, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGTxm14BPXA">Shuumatsu Shounen Hänsel</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GL6rNE37vg">has an answer song</a>.</p><p>If ShuuShouHän is about TPP’s various Reds, I think SouShouGre is about its various Cicis and Xenas. (Reminder that I think Abe is an alternate universe version/clone (it’s complicated) of Red, and Evan and azure are the same for Cici and Xena, and also that there are two Evans (one pre-Anne, and one post-Anne) but only one Azure.)</p><p>But, yeah. Cici and Xena, twins or cousins or childhood friends, hopelessly entwined around each other no matter how far apart they go, standing at the creation of a new world.</p><p>tl;dr this song is making me wonder if the new reset timeline was Cici’s plan all along, in which case HOLY SHIT YOU SCREWED EVERYTHING UP HARDER THAN EVAN HOW DID YOU <em>DO</em> THAT?!</p><p>Also: both songs describe four kids, or pairs of kids. So far, we only have three.</p><p> </p><p>S5/S6/the Gauntlet being part of this massive arc is kind of getting me back into TPP in a big way. S5 is the various pieces you don’t realise are connected until way too late, S6 is everything falling apart, and S7 may be an attempt to create something better from the ruins.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the second chapter of Gauntlet Disasters.]</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I don't know why Dipper just clicked with me and made me start rambling so much about lore you'd think it was 2015, but he did! Crystal set me off on a TPP kick that I'm still riding the shockwave from, and it's the point where my lore really started to take shape.</p><p>My friend Faeiri took the idea of an encounter between two timelines and ran with it. <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23959435">You should read their thing, it's pretty good.</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. Emerald Snippets</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Bits and bobs written during and after the Gauntlet Emerald run. More a collection of ideas than anything solid enough to call canon.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Honestly, it wouldn’t shock me if it turned out N was non-binary. I’m probably going to assume that this the same N from Unova until given an excuse not to. Whether this is pre or post Black 1, I’m not willing to pin down.</p><p>Probably going to go for the concept that the N who shows up in BB2 will have a completely different backstory than normal. Honestly, the idea of our new kid literally being N is way too funny for me to ditch.</p><p> </p><p>I support Mudfill the barboach. Or possibly mmd.fll? miku miku dance.obscure file extension</p><p> </p><p>That’s two post-Red teams with an alternate evolution of one of Reddo’s mon. I don’t think this trend can continue, but it’s interesting. Unless Sinnoh Kid gets a beautifly...</p><p>Another connection: each team so far has a mon that we previously got in the Hall of Fame. Reddo had vileplume, Dipper had steelix, and I think one of our previous hosts had an aggron?</p><p> </p><p>TODAY IN FOSSILWATCH WITH MITZI: N sits on their bike, right in front of the Mirage Tower. (No fossil has been taken. But…)</p><p>Wonder if any of the gauntlet kids will wind up with a fossil.</p><p> </p><p>[At N’s secret base] Awww, N likes playing pokémon tea party~</p><p> </p><p>[I write the ramble about N’s dreams and timeline inconsistencies.]</p><p> </p><p>Proposal: call aggron M5 and declare it an honorary azumarill.</p><p> </p><p>Current [= just after the beginning of the Touhoumon revisit] mitzilore plan is to make [the Touhoumon revisit] the Don’t Bleed on the Suits of the Gauntlet arc. It seems totally irrelevant until the last four minutes.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the ramble about Touhoumon.]</p><p> </p><p>One thing I’m really liking about how the Gauntlet/S7 lore is working out is it’s allowing me to get the fossil gods back into the plot. I love the cosmic toddlers, and I have this big epic backstory for them, but they’ve always felt kinda disconnected from what the Voices are doing after ~S3. Not any more! It’s mostly in the background for now, but that backstory is def sth I’m trying to work into the S7 metaplot, and maybe TPP’s myth arc as a whole.</p><p> </p><p>As for who Touhou!Red was... I don’t tend to count revisits as canon, but assuming I break my streak, there are four options for who this Red could be in mitzilore.</p><p>S1!Red: No. You don’t get Red without Helix.</p><p>Abe: There is a bit of precedent for Abe showing up out of nowhere with a completely different team than he usually has, but he was, like, glitched to hell and back at the time.</p><p>The fake Red from S3/S4 I eventually decided was TrAsh: Ehhh, maybe? It’s been a while since we saw him last, he could have ground up a new team and made some friends. Downside is he was never a host of the Voices, so odds of him surviving the timeline getting trashed are... low.</p><p>Reddo: Honestly, Reddo’s still kind of an unknown quantity for me. He’s still on the stage, so to speak, if he shows up here it’s as part of his main arc as opposed to being a secondary character in someone else’s. I’m just not sure what he’s doing right now, and so I can’t say if he can’t be here because he’s somewhere else.</p><p>MINION LIGHTNING ROUND: S1!Red has a cult, Abe could probably rustle up some guys who owe him a favour, TrAsh has, like, actual friends, and I’m not sure enough of Reddo’s situation to say if he could call anyone up to sit on a mountain with him.</p><p>Conclusion: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’d say it’s most likely to be Reddo, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be TrAsh, and I’d give Abe outside odds. Assuming I thought revisits were canon, anyway, which I don’t.</p><p> </p><p>My personal tier system is that main runs that run off a mainline Pokémon game engine happened in a recognisable fashion, PBR sidegames that do that happened in a less recognisable fashion, usually without the Voices involved, and everything else is take it or leave it. This is partially because I tend to think of TPP as an ongoing story in a consistent world more than a record of what happened on stream, and partially because there’s just so goddamn much and most of it I don’t care about. Maybe the weird non-pokémon sidegames are a record of what the Voices do/where they go when they’re not breaking shit in the main timeline? IDK.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I did end up with more ideas for N and their journey than I've put here. At the time I was planning on putting those thoughts into their chapter of Gauntlet Disasters, which, uh, I still haven't done. I don't think I've ever actually said this, but I conceive of them as an alternate N who the Voices came to when they were much younger, before Ghetsis found them.</p><p>That bit about Touhou!Red could easily have been its own chapter if it had any chance of being canon as opposed to spitballing.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Platinum Snippets</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Bits and bobs written throughout and after Gauntlet Platinum.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I've started editing out bits that are just me summarising what I already said.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Rowan didn’t mention Ice’s pokédex used to belong to someone else? Huh. I smell skulduggery.</p><p>It’s more that someone else obviously had that pokédex before her, but he didn’t tell her that. Why didn’t he say anything? Like I said. Skulduggery.</p><p>Or maybe he’s deliberately trying to hide it from her? I’m creating this whole conspiracy in my head now.</p><p> </p><p>Saw someone in chat call kricketot and turtwig ‘Bard’ and ‘Angry Turtle.’</p><p> </p><p>My immediate reading of BFG is Big Fuckin’ Gun. Big Effin’ Grotle?</p><p> </p><p>Lore idea: Ice’s main goal at this point in her journey is to find out who owned her pokédex before her, and what happened to them. I’m getting a very cool-headed academic vibe from her.</p><p> </p><p>[Commenting on Izzy not naming her new teammates right away] ‘I refuse to name any of my pokémon until they have ~proven themselves~’ (Or, more practically, ‘I’d prefer to get a grip on who a pokémon is before I nickname them.’)</p><p> </p><p>Random Izzy headcanon: She’s the Gauntlet timeline version of the same Dawn who was the Professor’s assistant in original Platinum. Academic research, yes, but with undertones of badassery.</p><p>If this is true, that makes 3/4 Gauntlet hosts with a prior relationship with the relevant Pokémon Professor. In a world that isn’t constantly on fire, turns out your average person doesn’t need to keep excruciating record of every pokémon they can.</p><p>Birch, I’m imagining, had no idea N existed until they jumped out of a tree to calm down that zigzagoon. He gave them that pokédex in the hopes that they’d be able to get close to pokémon no one else can.</p><p>Birch: Are you a boy or a girl?</p><p>N:</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>[Izzy’s] actually starting to remind me of Dipper.</p><p> </p><p>The newspaper dude in Solaceon, flipping through Izzy’s fourth-hand pokédex: Wow, you’ve seen a ton of pokémon. Go get an absol, wherever you’ve seen one.</p><p>The newspaper dude is programmed to only set you on mon you’ve actually seen. This can have... unintended consequences.</p><p> </p><p>I’m almost imagining Izzy conducting job interviews [for new teammates] at this point. [Terderrer had the idea of her giving the teammates who pass a nickname and a letter of approval, which I immediately stole.]</p><p> </p><p>I can see two lore explanations for mailrill.</p><p>1) Gulpin befriended marill in the PC, refused to join if marill didn’t come with. This does fall apart if gulpin gets ditched, yes.</p><p>2) ‘As you know, I have very high standards for choosing my team members.’ <em>WAIT WHAT ARE YOU DOING</em> ‘I have been able to discern that my esteemed colleagues have obtained spectacular results with your evolutionary line in the past.’ <em>WAIT STOP WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER MARILL</em> ‘As such, allow me to grant you this missive,’ <em>NO NO PUT DOWN THE MAIL</em> ‘And welcome you to Team Isabelle!’ <em>AAUUUUUGH</em></p><p> </p><p>‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but my calculations have led me to the conclusion that I STAND ABSOLUTELY NO CHANCE AGAINST A WORLD-DESTROYING MEGALOMANIAC ARE YOU PEOPLE SERIOUS?!’</p><p>N could handle all this pre-reset-timeline god fight existential threat extraness because N was already weird, but Izzy’s just a normalish girl from a world where this kind of thing just Does Not Happen. She has absolutely no context for what’s happening, is scared out of her mind, and can’t think of anything she can do that Cynthia can’t. She didn’t sign up to fight an eldritch abomination in a creepy-ass prison dimension!</p><p> </p><p>... Man, there have got to be so many terrified fossil gods screaming in SS’ face.</p><p> </p><p>[What with the USUM Rainbow Rocket boss themes playing while we went back to Platinum] ... That weird bit I put into my why-is-Touhoumon-relevant piece about Amber following music through the void seems a bit... prescient.</p><p> </p><p>After following a distant song across the void, the Voices return to Izzy a bit... discombobulated. Izzy didn’t even notice anything happening, for the record. ‘Are you feeling better now?’ <em>YEAH WE GOT THIS</em></p><p> </p><p>[I write the lore ramble about MetroRuby.]</p><p> </p><p>Amber’s dead! The Old Amber got guillotined just before we ditched MetroRuby, their HP was ticking down as the ‘will resume shortly’ text came up. I interpret it as a ‘Fly, you fools!’ moment.</p><p> </p><p>Heh, it’s almost a rags-to-riches story, innit? [Fish] just got on the team so we had something that could surf after a million PC shuffles, and now he’s Izzy’s strongest fighter. I support lumineon.</p><p> </p><p>[While hunting for Lake Spirits] Giratina is leading the party. I’m sure as shit drawing conclusions from that.</p><p> </p><p>TPP Giratina is always pretty chill, aren’t they?</p><p> </p><p>[I] can understand why people call lumineon Smugfish now. That lumineon may be the single strongest mon TPP has produced, and yes, I’m counting Pure Power Kyogre in that. Kind of having a what-have-we-wrought moment here. ‘Bitch, look at me now!’</p><p> </p><p>The vibe I’m getting from Izzy right now is of a girl so freaked out by Cyrus she’s assembling all the Sinnoh legendaries into a superteam for evil fighting purposes. If one is not innately extra, one must become extra.</p><p>(My only memory of TPP having a dialga is the one who ran Dairy Queen. As such, I’m characterising dialga as an intelligent businesslady. Probably has a clipboard. The incongruity of the situation is not lost on anyone, except maybe the Voices.)</p><p> </p><p>Last time we [caught Arceus] the game immediately cut off. Eventually I blamed it on Necrozma, but this... Izzy, legend trainer. All I know is that if Amber wasn’t dead they’d be having something very close to a heart attack right now.</p><p>[TK says that Izzy might be trying to pick up Amber’s slack.] ‘UNORTHODOX DISPLAY OF HUBRIS, BUT VERY WELL’ - Dialga, probably.</p><p> </p><p>[Izzy’s final team consisted of the Sinnoh creation quartet, a fish with divine powers, and] I guess the G in BFG stands for God. There are a lot of thoughts rattling around in my brain at the moment, the only one I can put into words is that I wouldn’t’ve called Izzy as the religious type.</p><p>- But wait! What if she’s a <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FlatEarthAtheist">flat earth atheist</a>? ‘My research suggests that my new teammates are simply unusually powerful pokémon, probably belonging to previously undiscovered species. There is no evidence that they are ‘deities’, whatever that may entail.’ She is, as far as anyone can tell, completely serious.</p><p>Man, Izzy’s dancing awfully close to Mitzi Villain Archetype #3: Person Who Has Badly Misjudged the Genre of the Story They’re In. They know what they’re doing, they’re just working off faulty information as to who the good guys are, or what an act of heroism is.</p><p>Like I said, she’s near the archetype, not on it. Not necessarily evil, but definitely working under inaccurate assumptions. She didn’t mean to screw things up as bad as she did. She didn’t even notice she was doing it. Maybe. We’ll see how the lore shakes out.</p><p>(Because if her new pokémon aren’t just stronger-than-normal legendaries, if beings that can reshape the world with no more than a thought do exist... She still has nightmares about the Distortion World.)</p><p> </p><p>I love our Gauntlet kids. Captain unintended consequences, pastel research slowpoke, chibi N, and now high-INT-low-WIS.</p><p> </p><p>[I get hype about GBB2.]</p><p> </p><p>If the backstage Gauntlet stuff I think is happening is happening, [“Aqua”’s] calling himself Hilbert. My HC is that he picked that name after a longish conversation with Jimmy and some cross-referencing with Alice’s weird Voices shit database.</p><p> </p><p>[Almia is] yet another region the Voices failed to save. Truly, the beginning of an untold tragedy.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Like half of this is about MetroRuby and I don't even care. It's one of those big events that I expect is going to get even bigger as the season goes on. For GPlat itself, I really liked how Izzy's character arc turned out over her run. That bit about Hilbert will be important later, trust me.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. Blaze Black 2 Snippets</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Bits and bobs written throughout the Gauntlet Blaze Black 2 run.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I’m this close to declaring all our Unova hosts are trans by default. Thiiiiis close. (Alek’s the only one I’m unsure about.)</p><p>The obvious conclusion [to Rival being named Y] is dumb and also impossible, and yet...</p><p>IDK what R’s gender identity is, but their presentation is definitely (a) feminine and (b) very loud about it. I’m basically imagining Nate in the female contest outfit from ORAS at this point.</p><p>What if Behemo Barisol was a host of the Voices?</p><p>Name consensus seeeeems to be Reese?</p><p> </p><p>Those bidoof [in Reese’s party] are the final boss of TPP.</p><p> </p><p>Oh my god, we got the wrong pokédex! Or wait, shit, what if Y has the pokédex???? He does seem a lot more... protagonist-y than Reese.</p><p>Bianca looks at the scowly loner with a mission to fulfil, and the flamboyant androgyne with the weird eyes. ‘Pick whichever one looks more heroic,’ Izzy told her. Having grown up in a world where the Voices aren’t a regular thing, Bianca makes an on-the-spot judgement.</p><p>I could see Wyatt’s attitude as... Well, Evan started out as a sweet little kid. I mean there’s no way he’ll be at the PWT, and them both having Voices eyes would explain why Bianca couldn’t tell who was actively possessed… The Gauntlet keeps throwing out-of-left-field plot twists at me. I love it.</p><p> </p><p>I just love the image of every plot important character going up to rival like, ‘As the new host of the Voices, your responsibilities are paramount. You must save the world,’ and the actual Voices are three routes away being terrorised by bidoof. [Reese is] host #5 in this universe, no one really knows what the Voices are like here. All they know is ‘freaky purple eyes’ and, well, Y has those. (Man, I’m going to need to get some actual headcanons about Y.)</p><p> </p><p>‘The Rangers couldn’t handle my style so they kicked me out.’ ‘Thought it was because you couldn’t handle a styler.’ ‘SHUT IT!’</p><p> </p><p>I’m basically imagining Reese as one of those anime girls who presents completely feminine, down to using female pronouns, but they’re actually a guy. Like those anime girls, it is entirely possible that Reese is a trans girl in ludicrous amounts of denial. ‘So you dress like a girl, and you talk like a girl, and you use she/her pronouns, but you’re definitely a guy?’ ‘Yep!’ ‘...Are you <em>sure</em> about that?’ ‘Hey!’</p><p>For srs though, I’m legit considering using she/her for Reese.</p><p> </p><p>Current mental image: Drive expositing basically the entire backstory of the Gauntlet to Colress.</p><p>Background: one day, this weird bug robot thing showed up in not-yet-plasma HQ. Said ai was a creation of Colress from another dimension, gave Ghetsis various Ideas. The similarities of the reset timeline to the OT may not be entirely organic.</p><p>Colress was of course incredibly suspicious, and cooked up a plan to trap Genesect. This didn’t work, because Drive is roughly on the same power level as the fossil gods. Hortunately, Drive proved very amenable to sitting down and answering questions, instead of, like, razing Unova. Thus, exposition!</p><p>... If anyone had a reason to want the old timeline back, it was the Old Amber. Their happy ending was snatched away and replaced with their charges’ worst possible selves. Now that they’re gone, though, Drive isn’t sure what to do any more, and Colress is basically the closest thing ai has to a dad.</p><p> </p><p>Cheren let us win [his gym battle.]</p><p> </p><p>[Haji was talking about how the pokédex design changes between games.] ‘This thing can’t even render colours!’</p><p>Izzy: How hard can it be to upgrade the pokédex? :VoHiYo:</p><p>:ten minutes later: ... Well, shit.</p><p> </p><p>Headcanon that Reese was really looking forward to her onstage debut and now the Voices are screwing it up. Faffing around Pokéstar Studios is the kind of thing you can do when you aren’t the protagonist. Either that or she’s trying to make a really oblique point about performance art.</p><p> </p><p>Y’know, if I had to pick a host who’d end up breaking off from the invasion or whatever to do Broadway, I wouldn’t’ve called Alice. Screw ‘What if any BW happened in this timeline?’ and ‘What happened to our pokédex?’, ‘Why is Alice on Broadway?’ is the new driving mystery of GBB2.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the ramble about possessed gym leaders.]</p><p> </p><p>Reached Join Avenue. Apparently when Reese is impressed she throws around Venus symbols.</p><p> </p><p>If BW didn’t happen in this timeline, I’m wondering if the partnership between N and Ghetsis was more an agreement between equals.</p><p> </p><p>My current interpretation of the plot is that Yang is going on an epic heroic quest to defeat Ghetsis and Reese is just wandering around Unova in the background. Having fun. Doing the cinema. Colress may be the only person in the region who’s realised who the actual host is.</p><p> </p><p>Seems Reese really likes being in movies.</p><p> </p><p>I’m imagining that an absolutely epic quest/war/saga is taking place juuuuust offscreen. The gate headlines are things like ‘- fight in mountains around Black City. King N of Team Plasma to -’ and that’s all the Voices hear about it, because Reese has already run off to Pokéstar.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the ramble about N and Team Plasma.]</p><p> </p><p>[After Reese does a survey] Worries over money seem to be a recurrent theme, maybe because she likes shopping? Seems to like sports too. Does pokémon battling count as one? And I like the undercurrent of down-to-earthiness here. Might be a way of distancing herself from the Pokéstar glitterati?</p><p>Orrrrrr – ‘An act? You think this is an <em>act</em>? A <em>performance</em>? No, my friend. All this - the makeup, the speech patterns, the walk, the pronouns, all of that is <em>me</em>. This is who I am.’</p><p> </p><p>[After Kelcyus makes the Reese-in-Iris’-costume sprite] One of the lesser-known perks of becoming Champion is the snazzy Champion costume. That’ll be the whole reason Reese goes anywhere near the E4, mark my words.</p><p> </p><p>Headcanon that the Voices are taking advantage of not having to save the world to fix up their pokédex. ‘Don’t you guys usually do that anyway?’ <em>SPOILSPORT SHHHHHHH</em></p><p>
  
</p><p>‘What would I need two legendaries for? It’s not like I’m gonna save the world. Let me make you a <em>star</em>’</p><p> </p><p>[After Victini’s release] I’m blaming Darkrai. Reese doesn’t seem to care, and may not have actually noticed. ‘What? It’s just a release, it’s not like Victini’s dead.’</p><p>‘Me and Victini, we weren’t working together super well, yeah? Different ambitions, different goals… Splitting up was for the best for both of us, and I wish them the best of luck. Someday we’ll meet again, onstage.’</p><p> </p><p>There’s a battle going on offscreen. Maybe a war, it’s hard to say. Ghetsis’ faction of Plasmoids has frozen Opelucid and is waging outright war on the Pokémon League and their allies. It’s epic and brutal and involves basically every single character that’s at least cameo’d this Gauntlet. As per usual, Reese is only vaguely aware of any of that. If she hadn’t been in Opelucid when the ice gun went off, she probably straight up wouldn’t know anything was going on.</p><p>Not the protagonist. While Yang is leading an army of gym leaders/former hosts into battle, Reese is wandering around route 21, getting her last badge from the only gym leader as out of the loop as she is, very very close to where Colress parked the recharging Plasma Frigate.</p><p>Several routes away from everyone important, Kyurem is relatively unguarded. There is, in fact, very little stopping Reese from busting aboard the boat, seizing its control deck, and flying off to the giant chasm to punch Ghetsis from the air (or however the B2W2 endgame works. Haven’t played it in a while.)</p><p>The point is, while everyone else, including most of Plasma’s army, is engaged in a life-or-death battle for the fate of Unova, Reese has the opportunity to sneak behind everyone’s backs and aim right for Ghetsis. Sometimes it’s good to not be the protagonist.</p><p> </p><p>In the depths of the Relic Castle, echoes, shadows, eyes. The skin of reality is stretching and tearing. Reese realising she may have severely underestimated how boned Unova is.</p><p>I think I’ll add that spin to the concept of Reese’s non-protagonist-ness letting her see the real threat. While everyone else is fighting Plasma, she travels underground and discovers the real way the world is imminently going to end. Drive is probably involved.</p><p> </p><p>Reese, desperately shaking Winona: YOU’VE ALL BEEN BLINDSIDED THE ICE THING IS JUST A FRONT TEAM PLASMA’S ALREADY STARTED THEIR REAL PLAN</p><p> </p><p>Yang: Zinzolin came from this way!</p><p>Reese: :immediately runs off in the other direction:</p><p> </p><p>[On the Plasma Frigate] Reese is like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItjXTieWKyI">"I'm queen of the world!"</a></p><p> </p><p>The Voices are basically Reese’s enablers [in not doing the plot] at this point.</p><p> </p><p>[Apparently, we weren’t supposed to be able to catch Darkrai when we did.]</p><p>Today, in Izzy making pacts with horrible legendaries she should probably have thought through more:</p><p>PMD is. Fresh in the mind, shall we say.</p><p> </p><p>Yang: We’ve stopped Ghetsis from taking over the world, and N from freeing the fossil gods! The world has been saved!</p><p>Drive: ... You really have no idea what your rival is carrying around.</p><p> </p><p>Petition: make Darkrai’s lore name WutFace.</p><p> </p><p>Today in PMD connections: chat seems convinced there’s a Time Gear on the Plasma Frigate.</p><p> </p><p>I headcanon that Dusknoir tells everyone his name is Li Er. Y’know, like a liar would do.</p><p> </p><p>Oh my fucking god, Izzy’s team was all deities, and Reese’s is all villains! (Also noting that 666 [which is what Krok’s name looks like ingame] could link to the Christian demonology glitches some of us were talking about in the earlier runs.)</p><p> </p><p>Biggest difference I’m seeing between Izzy and Reese’s pacts with powers beyond mortal ken of dubious motives is that Izzy is trying to protect the world and getting in just a biiit over her head and Reese just straight up does not care. Why would Reese second-guess travelling with a guy who destroyed another world’s space-time continuum and a minion thereof? She has movies to make!</p><p> </p><p>Personally read Reese more as being completely uninterested in ~the battle between good and evil, or whatever Yang spent the plot doing. Reese neither knows nor cares.</p><p> </p><p>Drive: NOW LISTEN HERE YOU DO YOU EVEN REALISE WHAT YOU’VE ooh fluffy</p><p> </p><p>[In reply to a loredump Faeiri made about Darkrai (among other things) getting a tacky statue of themself made] Imagining the rest of Reese’s team getting equally tacky statues.</p><p> </p><p>Badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges MOVIES MOVIES</p><p>Badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges MOVIES MOVIES</p><p>Aaagh! It’s the plot! Ooh, it’s the plot - it’s a</p><p>Badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges MOVIES MOVIES</p><p>
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI">Single worst filk I’ve ever committed.</a>
</p><p> </p><p>Even when the final battle is over, Reese is still going out of her way to avoid the plot for as long as possible.</p><p> </p><p>[After news drops that the Battle Subway Hilda/Hilbert fight was meant to be a past host cameo] Even now, the barriers remain closed. The world resists change. Also taking this as confirmation that alt!Jimmy and alt!Subway Hilda were at least involved in what happened two years ago</p><p>... Though, we haven’t actually seen any former host’s team yet, have we? Current HC is that Aqua is in alt!Hilbert. Not actively possessing, just... watching.</p><p> </p><p>[What turned on Challenge Mode is] possibly the same thing that’s got all the past hosts gathering near Driftveil. Something’s happened, to break the tone of the reset timeline and kick things up a notch. I’ve got a lot of ideas, but they haven’t really coalesced into anything yet.</p><p>‘You fools think you can keep the fossil gods sealed? The Voices have illuminated the way out, it’s only a matter of time.’ In the back of some gym leader’s head, Abe suddenly goes ‘OH SHIT.’ It’s like, the moment you realise that you miscalculated everything and you’re all boned.</p><p> </p><p>Less that Reese is evil, and more that her complete disinterest in anything plot-relevant makes her easy to manipulate. ‘Your Darkrai is plotting to-‘ ‘Yang, we‘re on set in ten minutes. I don’t have time for this.’ Imagining Alicebrina doing Surveillance.</p><p> </p><p>Yugnat: Although at one point [Yancy] said "Stop that!", and the overlay broke.</p><p>... Thanks, Dusknoir.</p><p> </p><p>I could totally see Reese having a crush on Marlon. May well be a she/her gay man.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>How very in character [for Reese to do movies instead of the PWT when it opens.]</p><p>[If M4’s get-to-the-PWT-already timer went off] Yang has finally had enough of Reese’s shit and personally delivers her to the plot.</p><p> </p><p>Headcanon that Reese was hanging around the PWT anyway for completely non-plot-related reasons when all the hosts showed up</p><p> </p><p>M4 turned the difficulty back down. Some wacky crisis has just happened and Reese missed literally all of it.</p><p> </p><p>[After the dex broke at the PWT] Reese blames the plot. ‘Ugh, why couldn’t they just use Yang’s dex, why are they making me copy down their stupid thing.’ People in chat are calling that the dex breaks in Kanto, so it’s probably Reddo’s fault.</p><p> </p><p>Izzy and Reese have completely separate takes on the situation. Izzy is screaming plot at Reese, and Reese is just blaming Izzy for the entire Plasma situation. They’re both kinda right? But it’d be a lot easier for them to solve it if they just sat down and talked to each other. But that would require Reese to pay attention to the plot, so that’s obviously not happening.</p><p> </p><p>Actually, I think the only proof we have now that any of the pre-Gauntlet hosts were ever here is Alice in Pokéstar. I’m having to rethink my entire conception of GBB2 RN. It’s a thing.</p><p> </p><p>Holy shit, Reddo! I have no idea if [all your mon losing their names is] your fault or Darkrai’s, but seriously dude!</p><p> </p><p>I can’t figure out if [Izzy’s sleeping fish] looks more or less smug.</p><p>Darkrai: Are you MOCKING me?!</p><p> </p><p>I think, for Reese’s sake, mitzilore is gonna cut off when the timer went up. Just say she got her ass kicked by Izzy and Darkrai’s evil plot or whatever was foiled. Done. Might change if we beat the PWT, but ‘if.’</p><p> </p><p>[I set out my GBB2 headcanons.]</p><p> </p><p>Dipper: the only sane man. It’s unfortunate that he’s kind of an idiot.</p><p> </p><p>[Xacrom points out how weird it is for Clay to be bullied.] Replace ‘bully’ with ‘blackmail’ if you prefer, or just outright threat.</p><p> </p><p>[TK asks if Reddo or Izzy is the hardest for Dipper to deal with.]</p><p>N, actually. Izzy usually at least means well, and Reddo generally gives him a heads up on whatever crazy glitch shit he’s doing, but N is completely unpredictable in every possible way. Reese is the easiest to handle. ‘Do you wanna come save the world?’ ‘No.’ And done!</p><p>… I just realised that Dipper is probably the only member of the group who’s any good at PR.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>GBB2 was an absolute blast. Not quite what I expected, especially at the PWT, but it was so much fun to make lore for Reese, her quest to finish all the movies, and also whatever Yang was doing off camera. B2W2, man. B2W2.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. X Snippets</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Bits and bobs written during and after the Gauntlet X run.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Girl, dark skin, Etr (Esther? Ether?) nicknamed Lil E, possible link to Lillie? Picked froakie, did a lot of Super Training. Possible host is really into association football or something.</p><p> </p><p>Team Flare is explicitly trying to rez fossils. /things only I care about</p><p> </p><p>... Honestly, compared to our last few hosts, Esther seems like a pretty ordinary girl.</p><p> </p><p>[After Sail got rezzed] I’m not immediately jumping on ESTHER ENDED THE WORLD because I’m still not sure what exactly happened in the BB2 finale, and there are hints that the world Esther lives in isn’t quite the reset timeline, STILL THOUGH!</p><p> </p><p>Very young girl, very young nightmare god. I’m imagining them getting along way better than anyone would have expected</p><p> </p><p>The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of Esther being kinda young. Her nickname is Lil E. I tend to conceive as Kalos hosts as being older than average, so this is a nice contrast to that.</p><p> </p><p>‘Why are you travelling in such a big group?’</p><p>D: I’m NOT! These losers keep tracking me down! Why won’t they GO AWAY?!</p><p>Venus: I’m leading them in our battle against Team Flare, of course!</p><p>Esther: Mama told them I need looking after &gt;:(</p><p> </p><p>Luvdisc is back in the party. Esther must really like him.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the one X lore ramble I did.]</p><p> </p><p>Esther... really has nothing to do with Team Flare, does she?</p><p> </p><p>[After Duck happens] Mental image: the Voices teaching Esther swear words.</p><p> </p><p>[Why does the Kalos League never do anything about Team Flare?]</p><p>X: Lys has successfully sold his plan to the League. They’re not interfering with his Voices trap.</p><p>RandY: Team Flare runs the region.</p><p>GX: Team Flare isn’t even the tenth most pressing problem the League has to handle in the aftermath of GBB2.</p><p> </p><p>... I think I’m going to lore [the E4 rematch] as the other hosts coming around to say hi to Esther. It’s a playdate! And there’s some friendly pokémon battles involved! Absolutely nothing to do with the metaplot, it’s just all the Gauntlet kids hanging out.</p><p>I personally went with it because it’s the only possible reason I could see Reese showing up. (If Diantha was secretly Reese the whole time, it would explain why the Elite Four refused to get involved with the plot!)</p><p> </p><p>[After Ash O-Powers us to victory] Oh my god, TrAsh may have been the single last person I expected to show up.</p><p> </p><p>‘Reese is alt!Diantha’ is creeping scarily close.</p><p> </p><p>[I write the massive plot summary lore ramble.]</p><p> </p><p>[If the Gauntlet kids were a Pretty Cure team…]</p><p>Pink cure: Esther. She’s the one who fits the Pretty Cure protag role best, I think. Well within standard pink tomboy-ness allowance.</p><p>Blue cure: Izzy. Smarts! She’s also got that ice association/icy personality.</p><p>Yellow cure: Reese. Loud, flashy, snarky cool big sis type. Very good odds at being fan favourite.</p><p>Red cure/mid-season new teammate: Red. Mysterious powers, tragic backstory. Might be one of those that starts out a bad guy? More in the Scarlet/Passion mould than Sunny/Rouge, as a red cure.</p><p>Mascot: Dipper. Slightly klutzy but always willing to help. Cheers everyone on.</p><p>Big good: N. They can smile serenely and be mysterious to their heart’s content &lt;3</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Esther's journey didn't have much lore, but it didn't feel like it needed to, somehow. No matter the global magipolitical situation or whatever, she's an ordinary girl, on an ordinary adventure.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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